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ALTHOUGH I'VE BEEN an ardent critic of Google, since circa
December 1, 2004, I've also been thankful when Google does
something to correct their, shall we say, "little mistakes".
Forsooth, Google still actively sup****ts the DNC 100%, but
this message isn't about politics. It's about the ARCHIVES...
Let's review the basic chronology of Google's post-election
apparent censor****p campaign. Without public warning, their
"beta" kicked in about one month to the day after Democrats
lost the election. The most immediately-evident and adverse
effect was that any embedded message links containing an '@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
'
character were parsed with an ellipsis (...), apparently to
prevent 'spam-bots' from the automatic harvesting of e-mail
addresses--thus, all message IDs and reference headers were
also munged, because they too all contain the '@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
' character.
Add to this, archived messages of significant size or line-
length were being mysteriously truncated, without providing
the user any means of downloading the entire message intact.
There were other, lesser problems encountered with Google's
Groups beginning in December 2004, but the above two issues
represent the most outrageous problems encountered by users.
Now, Why Google couldn't have waited to implement their beta
until all programming "bugs" were tested and finalized is un-
clear. Meanwhile, the Google Groups users at large have been
left to wonder just what the heck is going on at Google. And
it could be that widespread complaints about the Google beta
persuaded Google to rectify these and other problems much to
the benefit and relief of long-time usenet newsgroup posters
and subscribers. Google stopped truncating long messages and
also stopped forcing messages into non-monospaced text. Nice!
Lately, Google Groups users have noticed that the "..." that
still parses embedded '@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
' links (to thwart email harvesting)
are now highlighted. Clicking on the ellipsis brings up this
prompt to enter graphically-depicted characters into a field
(similar to the prompt you get when you submit a URL to MSN),
which, if entered correctly, "unlocks" the original article.
Granted, it's slow, and tedious by design. But at least now,
original articles and original message IDs are downloadable,
if only by one archived message ID at a time. While nowhere
nearly as convenient and simple to use as preelection times,
my hats off to Google for making the newsgroup archive once
again available to the public...a *significant* improvement!
Now, if only Google would stop sup****ting the DNC....that's
asking too much, I know. Suffice that the "Groups" are back.
Better late than never. I'm glad they got their act together.
Therefore I officially *retract* my boycott Google campaign.
(Provided that no other surprises cause me to reinstate it.)
Enjoy!
Daniel Joseph Min
*Min's (once again) Google-Archived Home Page On The WWW:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=XJBDEJF138262.9022453704@[EMAIL
PROTECTED]
Banned (Freeware) Books by Daniel Joseph Min in PDF format:
http://.....
<URLs censored by anti-freespeech liberal terrorists>;
search Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN, et al RNC-sup****ting search engines
(NOTE: to date half of my mirrored websites are still up & running)
to wit, you can search for my free "Books by Daniel Joseph Min" on:
http://search.msn.com/
http://search.yahoo.com/search/options
http://www.altavista.com/web/adv
etc. etc. etc.
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