for newsgroups, mozilla thunderbird 3 is now worth EXACTLY what I paid for it
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From: just john on 5 May 2010 14:52 It started when I "upgraded" to Thunderbird 3. The application's authors obviously don't use usenet, because with the new release, the treatment of threads with filter-deleted messages has become brain damaged. Let's take alt.slack as an example. The average reader of alt.slack killfiles at least half the messages that appear in the newsgroup, either mentally or via software. It's like Sturgeon's Law, which works because people don't have to agree which 10% is non-fecal material. Everybody on alt.slack is ignoring most of everybody else on alt.slack, but which everybody else varies from person to person. So it's often the case that one has the initiator of a thread killfiled (or "filtered," in Thunderbird parlance) but not all the people who respond to it. Thunderbird 2 was able to keep the thread tree together. But with 3, hell no! Each reply to a killfiled message starts a new thread, as far as the software's concerned. This has put strains on newsreaders in the past, and Thunderbird 3 was developing a situation that I last saw a few years ago: Its number of unread messages would be off by a small amount, which would increase over time. So I decided to ask it to rebuild the index for alt.slack. My retention settings are for 30 days old. Well, based on its progress in attempting to download over 640k headers, it'll take at least 4 days to complete the process. I thought it might just be a Giganews problem, so I'm now trying it with another nntp host. Same thing. And no, I don't want to just mark the whole damned newgroup as read, because for instant gratification, I can use Google Groups. I want some context for the new messages as they appear. And somebody at Mozilla must have known this in the past. Whoever that was must have left. So I come over to this other bit of software, MT-NewsWatcher, a program that's over a decade old. It found all the unread stuff in alt.slack in less than a minute. That's under sixty seconds versus four days. If Mozilla doesn't want to support usenet, why don't they just SAY so and drop it entirely? Otherwise, it's obviously broken, in many ways. Are they intending to fix it? And could they please include alt.slack as one of the newsgroups they use to test it? (And for those who are tempted to suggest it: Yes, I have Pan, and no, I'm not fond of it. And this MT-NewsWatcher I've been keeping about mainly because it can segment binaries properly for alt.binaries.slack, which is something Thunderbird has never even attempted to do.) -- * Radio Free Entropy: http://just-john.com/jjMusic |