On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:33:25 -0000, "Philip Eden"
philipATweatherHYPHENukDOTcom wrote:

... and I knew what you were doing. It worked.

No less perspicacious than I would have expected of
you, Dave .... so what do you think we might we try to
reduce all the off-topic bo11ocks that's ruining the group?

Well Philip, it's unmoderated so unfortunately hard to stop.

I get round it by having a better newsreader than OE (Forte Agent),
which lets me display posts however I like, by Date, Author, Thread
etc. and it's easy to skip past "problem" threads at a glance, they
collapse into a single line and are usually obvious from the thread
title or the author's name. There are alternatives to Agent, some are
even better.

I can "kill" any thread or author so that further messages are either
marked as read or deleted. I can re-sort at the click of a mouse by
Date, Author, Thread etc. to find old stuff (like your post in this
thread that I remembered, found and replied to after a few days) or I
can search for messsages by title, date or content.

I use Giganews, which currently has 6 years of text posts on its
servers, so I have on my computer every post in the NG from 2003
without having to use the Google Groups archive at all, except for
earlier posts. Can be handy.

The long and short of it is that I rarely get bothered by the
off-topic bo11ocks. My humble apologies if you already know all this.

--
Dave