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Why What Where When ...
- This page illustretes the advantage/disadventages og newsgroups.
- It exists because:
- I totally dislike forums as long as newsgroups exists.
- I link to this page in my tagline in forums i participate in.
- Because several people has major reasons for not using newsgroups, (Pure propagande I know ;) ).
- Why write back to me and why I encourage you to do so:
- If there's any faulty statements on the page.
- If you disagree with my statements and are able to be objective ofcourse.
- If you have a list of Why forums are good or a link to sutch a list.
- Why? because this is a oneman show, it would be nice with input from other people ;)
- This page was created Monday 24 April 2006, based on a Forum post I made 7 December 2003.
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Here's the strongest reasons for newsgroups/usenet:
- 100 % threaded
- Total freedom on filtering etc.
- Messages delivered upon request.
- You control what groups you wan't to participate in.
- User controlled mass download for offline reading.
- You decide when threads no longer are to be saved (unless they lie on the server forever).
- Unless wanted, newsgroup readers does not use HTML, hence avoiding illegal scripts.
- Less graphic unless explicity needed for illustration purposes.
- usenet can be integrated with Forums and E-Mail listings.
- Most Internet servers allready have the oppertunety to apply Newsgroups.
- Mutch more user specific operations when sorting, viewing and maintaining posts.
- You can sign up for a newsgroup service and have them sort out ALL the newsgroups and newsgroup servers you require.
- Usenet is by default text based, meaning if you write structured posts it will remain structured, forums and e-mail reading usually ends up deleting required spaces for such posts.
- Answers can be written offline and sent later.
- Forums can be set up to reflect usenets for people with newsgroup disabilities.
- You can (if allowed and necesarry) crosspost on newsgroups.
- Entire structure of the servers newsgroups can be seen and maintained very easy.
- Dependant on server settings newsgroups can be moderated grouped etc. by server admins, mutch more efficient than Forums.
- E-Mail listings can (by some newsreadears) be imported and post to E-Mail listing server if allowed.
- Each newsgroup can (normally) be set up to have specific behavior if needed.
- Many newsgroups are searchable in the net, there is a huge amount of old messages flying around, just to satisfy your needs.
- Working with newsreaders are MANY times more efficient and time (money) saving than using forums.
- Avatar's, graphical taglines and alike doesn't exist on newsgroups, since it's text based and thus minimizing the time to get the message from the server.
- You can read/download messages while you are using allmost all your bandwidth without too mutch interference, a forum site would be extreeeemly slow.
- You can allmost completely avoid using the mouse (close to 100%).
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Largest disadventage of newsgroups/usenet
- If abroad (from home) and the server doesn't have a browser interface (Allthough I haven't needed it yet) see Links below.
- Takes a lot of space if you are a heavy newsgroup reader (This case only exists if you decide to have the posts on your harddrive after the server has marked it deleted, posts are by default deleted when the server marks them deleted).
- Some (not all) newsreaders doesn't support having several servers see Links below.
- When replying, subjects can be edited (this goes for forums too) and the Forward, Reply etc. acronyms aren't standard.
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* The Agent and Free Agent profile manager, is outdated and is no longer maintained, it is still possible to run it in Windows, but since Forté changed their NewsReader, from the free, to all payed, this program is no longer needed.
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Copyright© December 2003~ OMD of TRA-TANR