Does anyone had suggestions for the best method to read this forum?

Perhaps I'm missing the obvious, but I find it hard to follow new postings.

I find the Active Forums Topics on the front page useful, but if there are a lot of active threads, I'll miss some.

The Forum itself has "New Posts", but sometimes when I click on a thread it takes me part-way through, sometimes to the start. Is my problem that I'm reading on different PCs, each with a cookie recording a different "last viewed" time?

I tried the RSS feed, but I think it only shows me new threads, rather than new postings to old threads.

Subscribing to a thread with email notification works, but I'd like to see all new messages by default.

Am I just doing it wrong? It just seems to be more work than reading a mailing list, yet it is the popular choice. I've used similar web boards before, but this is the first one that I'd like to follow closely.

click new posts then right click on the icon



and open that to a new window.

Or, if you're using something like Maxthon web browser, you can use mouse gestures on that icon (drag and drop) to open that link in a new window.

Web forums are a general nuisance. Younger people may think it is very modern, but actually it is a big step backwards.

Over 20 years ago, Usenet was invented, with newsreaders, threaded access, message filtering and ordering etc. Newsreaders are way better than any webforum. And faster too.

Very few forums allow both: web access and access via nntp (newsreader). Unfortunately this great intercultural technique is not very common.

There is no solution to that. I do read the "new postings" only. I may miss a lot and read a lot of garbage too.

People should be aware that what we have here is clumsy and worse than what we had 20 years ago.

Mmm, usenet. I'm not going to start.

I will point out that the site does RSS, and your average (or above-average) RSS feed reader will easily handle this problem.

Many people seem to like Google Reader. Personally, I use LiveBookmarks since I tend to only look at specific parts of the site anyways.

Under "Quick Links" there is a link to "Todays Posts" that I find useful. It is cookie independent and is easy to follow if you hit this site 2 or 3 times a day from various machines.

BTW, ARPANET was the tits, I would ask the SUN station guru to download posts within a date range onto fan fold for a motorcycle "gang" (group) I belonged to and I would read them on the plane to my next stop. Then post what I wanted to add at the new station, then repeat at the next stop, LoL. It wasn't unusual for some threads to go weeks before a reply...

I still correspond with some of those folks and we actually got together for a ride about 8 years ago.

Usenet opened up a broader audience but introduced us all to the wonderful world of SPAM and eventually became "Useless".

Usenet opened up a broader audience but introduced us all to the wonderful world of SPAM and eventually became "Useless".

Not really, the technical groups are still useful.

I think people who have never used a proper newsreader don't know what they miss. RSS, google groups, is all clumsy and backward compared to a good newsreader.

I've been trying RSS via Bloglines, but it looks like it only generates a new entry for each new thread. I don't get to see new messages to old threads.

I know usenet has lots of spam and suffers lost messages, but most newsreaders provide plenty of versatile ways to read messages (filtering, threading, killfiles, scoring, offline reading, single-keypress navigation to next unread message/thread, etc).

And I've found that gmail is pretty good for reading mailing lists. There are several 770 mailing lists, but none are very active.

I like this forum, and I was hoping that I was missing a better method of reading it.

We have quite a lot of spam here too recently.

At least with a newsreader you can filter the spam author that you don't see him - until he changes his identity again.

The problem of usenet is not so much the spam, but the bigger problem is that many people don't know abouit it and that lots of good discussions are taking place in web forums these days.

I have thought about writing some SW to convert web forums into a nntp readable format.

Not easy, as there so many different forum softwares. Actually, the web forums should provide nntp access, not very difficult to implement. They already have all postings in a database.

there is not enough hours in a day to read this forum... and the rest of the internets... annoys me sometimes. hey it's only 3 am...

This drives me nuts. Is there an option to disable this "helpful" feature? It's bad enough on threads I've read previously, but I especially hate clicking on a thread I've never opened before, and only getting to start reading the first post before I'm suddenly jumped to some random later addition.