Subject:
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Re: Posts expiring?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:50:15 GMT
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Viewed:
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46 times
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On 6/9/26 12:31 PM, Todd Lehman wrote:
> Aw, man, I hear that. If only we'd kept a fork of RTL on here as an archive --
> then it would still all be accessible. I think that was actually suggested or
> considered at one point, but the problem was huge volumes of spam, which was
> one of the things gradually driving people away from it, as I recall. I also
> seem to recall an objection was that if RTL were carried on here, then a lot of
> the discussions would muddy up together or be duplicated, which would have been
> a downside. But in hindsight, there's no reason it couldn't have been carried
> here in readonly mode. Gosh, I wish we'd done that back in 1998!
Funny, I had just finished reading the first big round of discussion on
this (Jan '99). At the time the major issue was cross-posting; RTL
wasn't yet overtaken by spam, but mostly just auction postings and
clueless newbies (the regulars all having migrated here).
I think it was the right decision at the time. The technical issues
around cross-posting weren't worth the effort, and a read-only feed
didn't add value since DejaNews already provided the archive.
And of course that archive remains today; it's only Google's interface
that's all mucky. There's more information in the archive than is
readily visible--used to be, you could reply to message and see its
actual Subject line; now, with replies disabled, you can't see when
topic headers are changed. You can group by conversation, but you can't
follow the thread easily and you can't see where the discussion shifts.
Another biggie is that whitespace has been stripped, so you can't see
proper formatting even if you set your browser to a monospace font.
I'm quite sure the actual message source lies somewhere underneath the
Google Groups page source. Someone cleverer than I could probably figure
out how to scrape all that data, but it would be nice if it were
possible to access the raw archive.
> You're making me nostalgic! I cut my teeth on rnews but then found Thunderbird
> to be so much easier. The web interface here is a workable compromise for
> systems without an NNTP reader, but nothing is better than the original gangsta
> readers!
Being on a Mac, my options were limited, but MT Newswatcher was what I
settled on after trying a couple of things. Worked like a charm! :-)
--
N. W. Perry
a/k/a "Plastikean"
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Posts expiring?
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| (...) Aw, man, I hear that. If only we'd kept a fork of RTL on here as an archive -- then it would still all be accessible. I think that was actually suggested or considered at one point, but the problem was huge volumes of spam, which was one of (...) (2 weeks ago, 9-Jun-26, to lugnet.admin.general)
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