www.Queensbridge.us wrote:
> I have a Yahoo Group where in a main page description about outages of
> hot water heaters I mentioned plug-in heaters to put in pails as are
> used in a barnyard. "Barnyard" caused a rejection of my Yahoo Group
> main page update.
It's really a sad commentary on society when a word like that first
conjures up bizarre carnal images involving farm animals.
> Trying to mention the TV show "Sex in the City" caused same problem.
> I anxiously await Google Groups to be able to replace Yahoo Groups
> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So the Yahoo people have all become
> idiots in recent years ... so what else is old news? The real problem
> is the amount of spam and the spam-enablers who keep insisting that
> filters are the solution. PAT]
I'm about to hang it up with Yahoo! I have a primary account I've had
for over ten years. I really only use it for Yahoo Messenger. They
charge for POP and SMTP for their email, a service that isn't all that
great. I log in periodically to empty out all of the spam that enters
my inbox instead of my junk folder.
I had a secondary account which was terminated last week for violating
their Terms of Service. No further explanation. I used my real
identity and location. I was not conducting illegal activities. I
wasn't swapping "adult" material. The best I figure is I said
something like "my ShopVac sucked all of the gunk out of the ditch..."
and their moral-bot spotted that 3rd word.
I much prefer Google Groups to Yahoo Groups. Aesthetics aside, here
are the two things I don't like about Yahoo Groups.
1. I like to keep private messages private and public messages public.
I see a lot of value in having a service like Google Groups with
publicly searchable archives for USENET and Google Groups. The problem
I've seen with Yahoo is once a group goes defunct, even one that was
private, suddenly shows up in search engines. I would say things in
private forums that I wouldn't normally say. When I started out as a
Scout leader, Googling my name brought up lots of hits full of off-color
remarks. For this reason I started using the X-No-Archive flag in ALL
of my messages to help prevent this. I would rather nothing show up
than private messages.
2. However, given how powerful Google is, I have removed the
X-No-Archive flag. I'm just a lot more careful about what I post. I
assume even private person-to-person emails will someday be indexed.
Google hosts my domain which means I use GMail for my personal email.
The spam filter is so good I don't mind using this address on USENET.
Yes, point 2 seems to contradict point 1. Instead of fearing if the
next thing I type will embarrass me five years later, I just let
everything be indexed.
John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
Austin, Texas, USA
John Mayson (john@mayson.us)