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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Flips Back to Groups Beta (Again) 363

Posted by Hemos from the flip-flopping-away dept.
afabbro writes "Google backed off its beta of Google Groups within 24 hours of making it mandatory for all users. You may recall that its lack of features (date searches), unwanted features (e-mail masking), and clunky user interface met with a very chilly reception here. Unfortunately, as of December 5th, Google Groups Beta is back and you can't get to the original (wonderful) Google Groups anymore. Be sure to share your opinion with Google."
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Google Flips Back to Groups Beta (Again) More

Google Flips Back to Groups Beta (Again)

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  • Email masking... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JPriest ( 547211 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:07AM (#11006994) Homepage
    What would be so bad about Email masking?

    • Re:Email masking... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Progman2000 ( 626305 ) * <<djohnson> <at> <progman.us>> on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:17AM (#11007054) Homepage
      For one thing, it breaks PGP signatures. May be minor, but it *can* be irritating.

    • Re:Email masking... (Score:5, Informative)

      by turnstyle ( 588788 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:18AM (#11007065) Homepage
      What would be so bad about Email masking?

      On occasion, it can be very useful to try and contact somebody that had a similar problem, but a while ago. (ie, the thread is long since inactive)

      And I doubt that hiding those emails will have much practical impact on getting less spam. (people often use NOSPAM type emails anyway)

    • Re:Email masking... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lxy ( 80823 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:21AM (#11007089) Journal
      What would be so bad about Email masking?

      Every so often I need info a thread that has gone dormant. Since a reply to the thread won't get a response, it sometimes makes sense to e-mail the author(s) directly. I have done this a few times, and even though sometimes the thread is almost 2 years old, I still get useful replies.

      I agree that public listings of e-mail addresses is a good way to get spam, but it is useful enough that I hate to see it completely removed.

      • Re:Email masking... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Lawrence_Bird ( 67278 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:24AM (#11007999) Homepage
        As the poster said, it can be useful to contact people directly, in particular when a thread is outdated and it may be unlikely the original author would see your followup. I have had people contact me about posts I made over 10 years ago.

        However, I have contacted google and told them they have violated the DMCA by engaging in unauthorized modifications to my copyrighted usenet postings. At no time did I give any right to google, or anyone else, to modify my postings of the past 14 years in any way. It is my right, not googles, to include my email address in my postings.

        To those who say 'but it will stop spam'. If you don't want to risk spam from usenet postings, use a fake or otherwise hidden email address.

        I would further add that acceptance of this sets a horrible precedent. What will be next? Filterning of certain news groups that might be deemed 'inappropriate' by some political groups? Editing or exclusion of posts based on keywords?

        Its a slippery slope and while this change might seem minor it goes completely against what usenet is about.

    • Re:Email masking... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:22AM (#11007095) Homepage Journal
      It's bad for two reasons. First, you're changing the contents of the post without notification and without the consent of the author. Second, e-mail masking can cause problems with false positives. For example, in Objective-C, there are several keywords that start with @, such as @interface. Some archives of Objective-C mailing lists have e-mail blockers, and so you see weird stuff like:
      <E-MAIL REMOVED> MyClass : NSObject { .... }
      I doubt if Google's e-mail blocker will be that stupid, but you never know what kinds of false positives it could find.

      There is also no purpose to it. Every single post ever made to usenet has already been harvested by spammers, so what's the issue with making them public?

      • Re:Email masking... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Jugalator ( 259273 )
        Every single post ever made to usenet has already been harvested by spammers, so what's the issue with making them public?

        New posts in their new proprietary Google Groups will also get harvested.
      • The only valid reason as someone else commented is to provide value to users posting using google groups. But again if you have a google account they can make that a default option that you could unselect. Also they arent exactly the gatekeepers of Usenet so kinda pointless if they're trying to protect the unwashed masses

      • Re:Email masking... (Score:5, Funny)

        by _randy_64 ( 457225 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:54AM (#11008323)
        For example, in Objective-C, there are several keywords that start with @, such as @interface. Some archives of Objective-C mailing lists have e-mail blockers, and so you see weird stuff like:


        But surely you and the other guy using Objective-C know each other and your email addresses by now?! ;-)

    • Re:Email masking... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:23AM (#11007097)
      The bad thing about e-mail masking is that it makes it hard to send mail to an author who has put an unmunged email address on their messages. These authors have put their mail addresses on a public forum (or decided to mung their addresses themselves, or put an invalid address) so why should Google go out of their way to "protect" people that don't want to be protected?

      I've received mail before from people who have found a post of mine on Google groups and wanted to ask me a quick question and I've always been happy to respond.... Why should google stop those people from mailing me in the future?

    • Re:Email masking... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Beetle B. ( 516615 )
      I have nothing against their not displaying email addresses.

      However, I should still be able to search for them. Very often I want to search for a post written by someone with a very common name, and do so because his/her email address is unique and not even near being common.

      They should allow us to search for the email address and return the all the results, even if not displaying the actual addresses.

    • Modifying articles is a copyright violation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anders Andersson ( 863 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @12:16PM (#11008507) Homepage

      I recently retrieved all articles in Google Groups posted using either of the four e-mail addresses I remember having used for Usenet (there were 429 such articles, posted between 1985 and 1997). I never mangled my e-mail address on purpose, but I had mostly stopped posting to Usenet when spamming took off in the mid 90's. Those four addresses have since all been disabled, although I tried to keep them alive as long as possible, as a matter of principle (I preferred using blacklists to silence annoying senders rather than give up my freedom to express myself in public for the convenience of spammers).

      Google not only masks the address of each poster, but also anything in the article itself that merely looks like an e-mail address, including Message IDs. When I quote somebody else, referring to the author of that quote by name and e-mail address, Google sees fit to remove that identifying information. I did not approve of them mangling my articles in this way; that was not part of the understanding of how my postings were to be processed when I made them.

      Since I retain the copyright to my articles, I have the right to control in what way they may be disseminated by others. I'm perfectly happy with Google or anyone else archiving my articles for future readers, as long as they don't modify what I have written. If someone wants to quote a significant portion of an article rather than all of it, that's fine too, as long as they attribute it to the original author, but that's not an archive, and that's not what Google is doing. Instead, Google is systematically erasing information detailing exactly who wrote what part of each article. What if an e-mail address is used as the sole identifier of the author in an explicit copyright notice, will Google destroy that information too?

      As for Google allowing individual authors to opt out from having their articles archived at all, that's fine but it's no excuse for systematic copyright infringement, however small. To make a rough analogy, that's like Napster allowing copyright holders to request their own titles to be removed from Napster's database on an individual basis, while continuing to distribute anything the copyright holders haven't complained about (maybe because they haven't found out about it). For distribution to be legal, copyright requires authors to opt in to it, not fail to opt out. If authors want to opt out from enforcing their rights, they do so by neglecting to sue.

      I want to tell Google: You can continue distributing my 429 articles if you like, as long as you distribute them verbatim, without any modifications of what I once wrote. Google however does not provide me with that option. Should I really have to send Google 429 removal requests, and then submit my articles to some other public archive, just to make that point? What a waste.

  • boo (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:08AM (#11006995) Journal
    I can't believe that you removed a FREE service that I liked and used and replaced it with another FREE service with lesser features... I'm sure you will release the old service as a pay service... how DARE you try and make money...

    signed... disgruntled freeloader.

    • Re:boo (Score:3, Informative)

      by gowen ( 141411 )
      I can't believe that you removed a FREE service that I liked and used and replaced it with another FREE service
      Well, considering that they don't have any explicit right to reproduce everyone's copyrighted Usenet postings, they'd be really hard pushed to charge for this service anyway. In this case, the freeloading cuts both ways.

      • Re:boo (Score:4, Insightful)

        by BillyBlaze ( 746775 ) <tomfelker@gmail.com> on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:23AM (#11007101)
        I think it's clear that when you post something to Usenet, you understand that it will be copied, without any further permission requested from you, onto news servers and to news clients around the world. If someone doesn't like that, they shouldn't have posted - they have no right to tell Google whether or not they can charge people for their interface (one of many) to access the newsgroups. (Obviously, one can only licence their own copyrights, so I'm not saying you can share other people's copyrighted stuff.)

        • Re:boo (Score:3, Informative)

          by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) *
          Actually, you can revoke that permissiona and request that Google remove your posts from the archive.
        • You are framing the question incorrectly. Its google that is choosing to mirror the data. its still copyrighted to you, and google is altering the data and access to the data. Doesn't sound very ethical or legitimate, regardless of case law or copyright law.

          Cheers.

      • Re:boo (Score:5, Funny)

        by Ubergrendle ( 531719 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:36AM (#11007174) Journal
        They would be charging for the service, not the content. Usenet is public domain... you can archive 10,000,000 gb of information if you wish on your home data storage array too if you'd like.

        • Re:boo (Score:2, Informative)

          by gowen ( 141411 )
          Usenet is public domain
          No. It isn't. Nothing is public domain unless put there by its copyright holder, or by the expiry of its copyright.

          • Re:boo (Score:5, Informative)

            by dissy ( 172727 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:21AM (#11007473)
            > > Usenet is public domain

            > No. It isn't. Nothing is public domain unless put there by its copyright holder,
            > or by the expiry of its copyright.

            While its true the posts are not public domain, and technically are copyrighted, the authors already granted permission for the usenet network to reproduce the messages and distribute them to usenet clients, simply by willingly posting them.

            So google, acting as a usenet carrier/server, has the permission to do this.
            Additionally, as long as the people using clients do not reproduce the works outside of usenet, they have the right to obtain and archive the messages as well already (copyright never prevented that)

            So google could even charge for this service legally.
            I'm glad they choose not to though.

        • Archive all of USENET yourself (heh, if your ISP gives you enough USENET bandwidth to even keep up).

          Then run Google search on your own data!

    • My petition post:

      Please understand that it's been the technical user base that's supported your product from the start. We have told our friends and family to use google over yahoo or other popular search mediums because it was _spare_ and it did its job well.

      Trying to pave a commercialized highway through usenet postings is a fantastic way to alienate your 'grass roots' fanbase. There are _many_ of us who are very displeased with the recent 'dumbing down' of google groups.

      As soon as you let marketing

  • On the plus side (Score:5, Informative)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:08AM (#11006996) Homepage Journal
    ... date limited searches are back on the "Advanced Search" page! Woohoo! That was the show stopper for me. Other than that, its nearly all cosmetic changes, and I don't care about those.

    • Re:On the plus side (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ajs ( 35943 )
      It's just typical reactionary UI response. People see something that doesn't do what they expect in exactly the way they expect it, and they cry foul before looking into the advantages.

      Things I see that are good:

      1. More user-centric (highlighting names, etc.) rather than message centric.
      2. The GMail style expando-headers makes for faster drilling down.
      3. Much faster page loading (might just be new hardware).

      The down-sides:

      1. I think the tree mode is the more usable, and yet you have to click to get to i

  • It Seems To Me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Opalima ( 744615 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:08AM (#11006997)
    That of all the tech companies plying their wares on the web, Google is one of the few that actively listens to complaints and at least in some measure, acts on them.

  • Sucky. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Threni ( 635302 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:09AM (#11007003)
    The new interface is horrible. Is there any technical reason why Google can't provide a 'Classic' view? Is the underlying data going to be that different? It's going to have to show the old, archived data still, which it obviously can with both the old and new systems. So why not continue to offer it?

    Failing that, is there another way to look search/view the old Usenet archive?

    • Re:Sucky. (Score:5, Informative)

      by will_die ( 586523 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:14AM (#11007033) Homepage
      You can get close to the old format.
      Click on a group, then at the top of the messages, click on 'Viewing titles only'. This removes all the text and gives you just a listing of all message titles.
      Now insides of a message goto the top, and just above first message you will see a link of 'view as tree'. It still is missing the previous,next links at the bottom. Also it does not have that bar along the side of the tree showing you which messages are in the other frame.

    • Re:Sucky. (Score:3, Funny)

      by dvk ( 118711 )
      > It's going to have to show the old, archived data still, which it obviously can with both the old and new systems. So why not continue to offer it?

      Not sure about the technical reasons, but t the very least, there's also the business reason - any code there is needs to be maintained. Which costs the company money. So any code the company doesn't need won't be maintained and thus will be retired.

      This is just a WAG, there could be other reasons too (underlying data / APIs / etc..)

  • Not bad enough (Score:5, Funny)

    by wallyghost ( 596530 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:10AM (#11007005)
    Thanks to some drunken post-hockey game USENET posting a couple years back, I was really hoping they'd come up with something a lot worse. Hate to retire the email address, but I guess it's either that or live with those posts forever. (Oh, and of course the worst of what I wrote was replied back to me by someone else so I can't unpost it)

  • I like it! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shic ( 309152 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:12AM (#11007019)
    I wonder - am I alone in seeing the "Google Groups 2" as a significant improvement on the original?

    I like the improved 'posting' speed; I love the 'starred topics' (Though I remain sceptical that the 'new posts' feature works properly - I keep thinking "new since when?"). I like the idea that a thread has become the notional unit searched in the new UI - Google Groups 2 far better suits my needs.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Well, they removed the ability to deep-link directly to a posting.

        No, they haven't [google.com] (to take a random example).

        However, I admit that the single-posting link doesn't have an obvious way to get back to the thread. One way, of course, is to search for the text in the posting...

        • but I still don't see what the complaining is all about. It's called BETA for a reason. If you don't like a feature, time to let them know.

          it needs to be able to view the post back in context (ie thread view). other than that I don't see anything here that wasn't before. It's just different - not the same - but not really worse.

          I think what folks are most threatened by is google appears to be going after a yahoo type look - ie to make it look more like a web forum and less like usenet.

          Can't have all thos
      • You *can* deep-link directly to a post. One of the links in the header of each post in the thread listing is "Individual Message", which takes you to a page with only that post.

      • Deep linking is back (Score:4, Informative)

        by michaelmalak ( 91262 ) <michael@michaelmalak.com> on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:10AM (#11007410) Homepage
        In response to my Slashdot submission [slashdot.org] a few days ago, a couple of people responded with a non-intuitive way to grab a deep link. But it looks like Google listened, and not only is search-by-date back, but "Show original" is now an option again -- the more intuitive way to grab a deep link.

        However, the deep link you get now is a Google article number, similar to the DejaNews article numbers -- which no longer work of course. The old Google deep links encoded the MsgID directly in the URL, thus guarateeing their usefulness in the future.

    • Re:I like it! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:30AM (#11007135)
      I wonder - am I alone in seeing the "Google Groups 2" as a significant improvement on the original?
      So you're the guy who liked Cherry Coke?
      • Cherry Coke is good and people like it.

        You're thinking of New Coke. Which you can actually still purchase in the mid-west. Right next to clear pepsi and Moxie.
        • You've managed to confuse the Midwest (or "mid-west", as you put it) with the South.

          Note, we (the Midwest) are not in the South and do not have New Coke.

          Also, nearly all of our vehicles have hoods.

    • Re:I like it! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You are not alone. The old interface seemed anything but "wonderful" to me, especially with its truncation of long posts -- as soon as you started to read anything with a bunch of quoted text, the amount of clicking and scrolling got insane. Now they've added "hide quoted text" and "show quoted text" links, and the whole "read more..." business seems to be a thing of the past (though I haven't poked around enough to be completely sure of that).

      Also: when viewing a group summary, clicking "view titles only"

      • Re:I like it! (Score:3, Informative)

        by endx7 ( 706884 )

        Finally, the "old" interface is still very much available. It's at http://groups.google.com

        Incorrect. Try to go anywhere from there and you just end up with the new interface anyway.

    • Re:I like it! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ralconte ( 599174 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:49AM (#11007279)
      Well ...

      1). The new format wastes screen real estate. The default forces you to view a summary of the posts, with a left sidebar of where you've been lately, and a right sidebar of other messages. I liked it better when I simply got a complete list.

      2). Looking at titles only causes the subject text to overwrite the date field, in a jumble of characters. Now, this may be because I'm using Mozilla, on Linux -- Windows with IE may handle the fonts better.

      3). The old format had a click on the username, to instantly link to a search for that username on Google groups. I'd never respond to a new usenet posting until it arrived on Google and I was able to do this -- it's crucial to determining who's a troll. Even if trolling is not a problem, the ability to check the quality of the information by what the person's said before is important. You can do it here on /., you know.

      4). I liked browsing sci.chem.analytical [groupsrv.com], comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips [usenet4all.com], or even rec.crafts.brewing [google.ch] in a clean format. I don't need to join a Google groups clone of Yahoo groups and participate in the newbie love-fest. (If I've missed other sources of web-based Usenet archives, I'd like to hear about them)

    • If they want to limit me to threads, then I want to be able to add the number of replies and authors per thread to my search.

      Eliminating threads that have 1 message/0 replies would make finding things MUCH faster. Right now I find tons of threads that are people asking the same question, and not very many where someone provided an answer.

      Didn't some student not too long ago research what made a "good newsgroup"? They should put his research into the search parameters somewhow.

  • Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:13AM (#11007024) Journal
    As of 9:10 am (EST) on December 6:
    • groups.google.com goes to the original interface, not to the beta.
    • Following a link to the beta shows that you can now easily search a date range.
    Not that Hemos could have, you know, looked before posting this...

    • Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Zorilla ( 791636 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:16AM (#11007046)
      This is Slashdot. They were probably referring to a change to Google Beta made in October 2002.
    • Interesting because I'm seeing the Beta interface by default a mere 7 minutes after your post.
      • I'm seeing non-Beta as the default interface at groups.google.com, but I'm seeing date search capability on the advanced search page of both:

        http://groups-beta.google.com/advanced_search

        http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?h l= en

      • Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by isometrick ( 817436 )
        I've found that Google sometimes changes the content by region and by how old your cookie is. They have a timestamp and a signature inside of the cookie (to verify that it is generated by them), among some other things.

        In my experience, users with older (>24hr) cookies see these kind of changes, while the rest have to wait for their cookie to age a bit.

        Maybe this will clear up the nonstop "I see it, I don't" posts about Google sites.
    • As of 9:20 am (EDT) on December 6:

      When I type groups.google.com into my address bar, I go to the new interface.

      Even if I clear my gmail "remember me" cookie, I go to the new version.

      The initial search interface is the same but he results are the new interface.

    • Mod parent down (Score:3, Informative)

      by Snaller ( 147050 )
      The first page looks like the original but if you search you are in the new interface - no choice.

  • It doesn't sound bad at all... (Score:4, Informative)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:15AM (#11007037)
    ...in their press release [businesswire.com].

    If you read it, it looks like they are really aiming it at the LCD, with key segments like:

    Using Google Groups, people can search and participate in a variety of discussions. For example, someone looking to buy a new digital camera this holiday season can search for (digital camera recommendations) and find relevant posts from others about the best cameras to buy. A user can star (bookmark) this topic to watch and subscribe to receive posts from a group such as rec.photo.digital to regularly read more opinions on digital cameras. Similarly, users looking for advice on treating carpal tunnel or disputing a cell phone bill can find discussions from other people who have experience in these areas.


    Then again, most press releases are written with their intended audience being 6-year olds. "Ford Motor Company Inc. makes cars! Vroom vrooom! Beep beep! Ford cars!"
    • Similarly, users looking for advice on treating carpal tunnel [...] can find discussions from other people who have experience in these areas.


      I know this is just an example illustrating the possibilities, but wouldn't it be wiser to consult a doctor instead of joining a Usenet discussion to explain your situation (using a keyboard), reply to questions (again using a keyboard), looking for other threads (keyboard)...
      Isn't that a little odd?
      • Doctors are nothing but shills for the pharmaceutical industry! Through UseNET, I'm able to find safe and effective traditional remedies - like the leeches fattening themselves on the backs of my hands, as I type - that keep me happy, healthy and productive.

        Also, quite frankly, there are too many drug interactions for any doctor to keep track of. But, through useNET, I learned that chewing cinnabar kills off leeches! So I've switched to an alternative treatment for my social anxiety disorder - electric sho

  • original Google Groups (Score:5, Informative)

    by davron05 ( 778470 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:18AM (#11007058)
    Unfortunately, as of December 5th, Google Groups Beta is back and you can't get to the original (wonderful) Google Groups anymore. just visit any regional Google Groups, like groups.google.ch [google.ch] and you can still use the old interface.
    • . just visit any regional Google Groups, like groups.google.ch and you can still use the old interface.

      Sure, but for how long? After they've settled down with the American version, they'll translate it and fuck up the others too.

      And people keep saying "Click on options" to do this or that. IT DOESN'T WORK IN MY BROWSER.

  • Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by northcat ( 827059 )
    Can some please translate the summary to English for me? I can't understand a thing from the summary. The summary says "Google backed off its beta of Google Groups" but "you can't get to the original (wonderful) Google Groups anymore". What the hell is there then? Two monkeys and a flying squirell? Plus, when I go to groups.google.com I see the original Google Groups - contradicting the summary. What am I missing here?

    • Plus, when I go to groups.google.com I see the original Google Groups - contradicting the summary.

      Google often releases a change to a subset of its servers, then backs it out later. I assume this is a "live beta" strategy.

      Even when Google is implementing a change it can take several days for it to work through the entire server farm. You can refresh 2 or 3 times and get different screens each time.

      So, at this point we know that there are 2 Groups interfaces out there, somewhat randomly distributed. We

    • You must be new here...
  • Can still link go the old version from google.co.uk mainpage and from www.google.com/firefox at 14:21...

  • Great... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Iphtashu Fitz ( 263795 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:22AM (#11007093)
    These changes have completely fscked up links to usenet posts. A web page I know of that documents a lawsuit (won't post here since I don't want it to get slashdotted) provided links to relevant usenet posts. It now points instead to completely different unrelated posts in other newsgroups.

    For example, the link http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&ic=1&selm=a n_638071147 [google.com] used to point to a post in news.admin.net-abuse.email. It now redirects for me to http://groups-beta.google.com/group/it.discussioni .auto/browse_thread/thread/dadced92c14aee94?ic=1 which points to an article in it.discussioni.auto. So Google seems to think there's some sort of correlation between news.admin.net-abuse.email and Italian car discussions???

  • In other news... (Score:2, Informative)

    by flatface ( 611167 ) *
    This probably isn't enough for a story, but Google finally has translation support for Eastern languages... I've tested Japanese, Chinese and Korean. They seem to be a lot like Systran's (babelfish) translations, but not exactly.

    You may mod me offtopic now.
    • Google translation inhales the sphere of the donkey.
    • I haven't tried this specific implimentation, but google's webpage translations are not the same as babelfish's, at least for German. (Even though there are better translators out there, the quick link to "translate this" in search results is often enough to tell me if I should bother dragging out my german-english dictionary)

  • Only on google.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by AndrewRUK ( 543993 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:28AM (#11007125)
    If you don't like the new itnerface, just use it with a country code domain rather than .com. I've checked the UK [google.co.uk], Canadian [google.ca], French [google.fr], German [google.de], and Australian [google.com.au] versions, and all have the classic interface, rather than the new one.

  • Using it as a Mailing list (Score:3, Interesting)

    by codeguy007 ( 179016 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:28AM (#11007129)
    Well I am using it as a mailing list and it works well and better than yahoogroups lately though most of yahoo's problems with some ISPs have been resolved.

    However does the Moderation work yet?

    I tried to setup an announcement list where the members can make announcements which would be moderated. I attempted to send message that required moderation and was able to moderate the message. No email no mention of the queued messages on the site. Nothing. As such we are still using yahoogroups for that list.
  • I gave the new Google groups a visit for the first time this morning. Under "recently visited groups" it listed gnu.emacs.bug, which is strange because I haven't used the new Google groups before, or the old Google groups in months, and because I have never used Google to visit gnu.emacs.bug. The posts were mostly garbage: a Rolex ad, a Nigerian 401 phish, a via/g/ra ad, one in an Asian font, and the rest in Cyrillic. Only one of the posts listed in the first set was about emacs. This only confirms my belie

  • Couple of interesting new features (Score:4, Informative)

    by gorbachev ( 512743 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:35AM (#11007166) Homepage
    You can subscribe to Usenet groups and get all the postings to your email address.

    There's an Atom feed file for every group.

    The about page for each group has group archives available by year and month.

    I think once (if) I get used to the new interface this new Google Groups could be very nice indeed.

  • All of them haven't changed yet (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vilim ( 615798 ) <ryan @ j abberwock.ca> on Monday December 06, 2004 @09:37AM (#11007183) Homepage

    I was wondering what the original post and this one was talking about until I realised that I am in canada and am automatically redirected to the google.ca page. groups.google.ca still has the old interface

  • Perhaps there is some confusion over the fact that the link "Groups" from the main Google pages now points at the beta. However if one goes to "groups.google.com" directly, you see the same old interface and merely a link inviting you to try the beta if you like.

    I happen to have been doing some research all last week and this weekend on groups.google.com and have not noticed any strange changes at all. Sounds to me like they just changed a link on their front page to drive traffic to the beta, big deal?
  • In the older version, it used to take several hours to post a message. I tried posting a new topic today on my favorite board (asby), but the server was down, so I could not test it out. Does it still take hours to have a message posted?

    Thanks

  • Does anyone remember when Altavista dropped usenet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by expro ( 597113 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:05AM (#11007373)

    I really wish they hadn't. It would be nice at least to have a second source. Of course they would have had to eventually limit searches on binary groups they offered, but it was a sad day when they dropped it altogether.

    Altavista advanced search capabilities always seemed far more advanced than Google, even now. For example, how, again, in google can I search for an article where a specific word is near another specific word (within n words), to avoid all the false matches of composite content? Google seems to spend most of its efforts determining where 80% would like to go relative to a particular topic rather than any degree of accuracy.

  • Threaded view? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:09AM (#11007396)
    Am I blind, or is there really no way to get a threaded view of the headers? The flat view useless.
  • The old system was terse with single line message descriptions. This was the philosophy of the google home page and many news-readers. Now they throw a couple of pages of message contents at you. I find that cluttered and harder to navigate.

  • Search by Date seems to be there... (Score:3, Informative)

    by the_pilif ( 548146 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:34AM (#11007580)
    ... http://groups-beta.google.com/advanced_search it's just right there at the bottom of the form. So for me all this whining around is quite senseless. Without this date-search, google groups would indeed be completely useless (who is interested in answers to tech-questions asked around 1990?) Philip
  • This groups-beta goed right against Google's corporate mantra of "don't be evil".

    Well, they would become evil sooner or later (all big things do), so I guess this is the time.

  • Ugly fonts! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ZorinLynx ( 31751 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @10:44AM (#11007648) Homepage
    I hate the new proportional font they adopted for messages. Usenet is meant to be looked at in a fixed-width font! Proportional fonts totally screw up lovingly crafted sigs, ascii art, and so on.

    Who was the nutcase at Google that thought Groups needed a facelift? It was FINE AS IT WAS. I don't know what they're smoking over there.

    I'm going to use the Canadian Google Groups (google.ca) in defiance for now, but I bet it will go away soon as well.

    Arrrgh. Companies can't just leave a good thing alone.

    -Z

  • Is it just me? I like it! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MarkWatson ( 189759 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:03AM (#11007795) Homepage
    I use Google Groups all the time - never did search by date so I don't care about that. I like the new UI.

    I used to go to a lot of trouble handling NNTP feeds; since Google Groups was released I don't bother.

    A little bit OT: Is it just me, or are some things getting simpler? GMail and Google Groups cuts down my 'overhead time'. The switch from Linux (well, sometimes Windows 2000) to Mac OS X saves me a lot of admin hours each month. The quality and productivity of coding tools (e.g., IntelliJ and LispWorks) is going through the roof: everything seems to be getting easier :-)

  • Wrapped links remind me of spam (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cfortin ( 23148 ) <chris@fortins.org> on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:31AM (#11008062)
    I really don't like it when the text for a link doesn't match the target. If you see

    "http://sonyelectronics.sonystyle.com/m..."

    and then notice that its really

    "http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://sonyele ct ronics.sonystyle.com/m..."

    it makes you wonder what use they have planned for those click histories ( tied into those cookies ).

  • Google - Real Ultimate Power (Score:3, Funny)

    by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @11:34AM (#11008102)
    After reading the submission's tittle, I can't help but think:

    Google can change beta environments anytime they want! Google changes their interfaces ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip betas ALL the time. I heard that there was this Google developer who was eating at a diner. And when some dude entered a Groups search the developer changed the whole Groups interface. My friend Orkut said that he saw a developer totally undercut some interface just because people were used to it.

    And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • More Important Than The Human Genome Project (Score:4, Insightful)

    by paranerd ( 672669 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @12:03PM (#11008428)
    Warning: I go off the deep end on this subject. But I'm sincere for all of that.

    DejaNews is more important for our society than the Human Genome Project. Just because only Slashdot-types (mostly) understand that doesn't make it less factual. It's wrong to leave it in the hands of one company.

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