Scott,
I may be in the minority here. But this to me is a DETRIMENT to the board. Not an asset. Having an unmoderated generally clutter-filled, spam-ridden, flame-prone, unmoderated newsgroup forced on those who come here for a moderated, focused forum will NOT help SatelliteGuys' cause.
This message board did not have 800 posts today. The Use Net newsgroup had about 50 information posts with 750 combined flames, spams, questions about piracy, and advertisements.
I am happy for you that you were able to get this thing to work. But if there is no way for people like me to filter out the junk, it is not a feature. It's a bug. The idea of this being integrated into the board with no "off" switch is to the detriment of people like me that come here to get away from the newsgroups.
Unmoderated newsgroups and moderated forums groups are diametrically oposed to each other! Combining the two is not an asset. It devalues the uniqueness of the forum and the reason to visit the WWW site. At the same time it opens the clean WWW site to the garbage that is 75% of the newsgroups postings.
Again, the merging of the two is okay as long as people like me have the option to filter out the offending material (like the entire section containing the newsgroups)
Yes I know I could go forum by forum and look one-by-one to see if there are any messages that appeal to me. Or I could just look at the "new messages" and weed out all the CRAP from the newsgroups. But neither is convenient and neither is something that will make me want to visit daily as I do now. This is the reason why I don't visit DBSForums daily. They don't even have a "search for new messages option.
If there really is no way to weed out the newsgroup "new messages" from the rest of the forums, then that feature becomes useless to me and these forums are much more difficult to navigate. Therefore I am less likely to visit on a whim any more. I am less likely to see all the information I otherwise would have since I manually would never navigate the DirecTV or Voom or any forum other than General and Dish Network. Which means that even if it's posted here first, I am more likely to see it elsewhere first.
Please don't read this as a threat or ultimatum. It's nothing of the sort. And I am not conceited enough to think such a tactic would do anything other than make me look small and foolish. It is just the truth about the way I feel.
I read the newsgroups every day. Specifically I only read these two. But I do it through my news reader with spam-blockers and personal filters finely honed over 12 years of usenet reading experience which allows me to zap passed garbage. If it's now part of this forum, where the same type of navigation is slow and at the mercy of the board's filters and editorial settings, I want nothing to do with it.
Thanks for hearing me out.
See ya
Tony
