🚀 go-pugleaf

This thread explains an experience I had this week, and about which I'm
pretty damn pissed off.  If I have a second instance of this, I'll
definitely find another ISP.

Just before Christmas, I purchased a $55 chess playing program, Macintosh
version.  The manual left a lot to be desired and was oriented toward the
PC version.  I had a few questions about the notation in the display and
sent email to the programmer in England.  After not having received an
answer for a few weeks, I posted my questions in rec.games.chess.computer
and checked that newsgroup daily for an answer.  Late last week I received
an email from a fellow giving me a few minor tips and mentioning that a
certain person had thorougly answered my questions.  I put the person's
name into a search engine and found his web site.  He is the proprietor of
a British magazine on chess computers.  So, I then looked in deja news
(aka www.deja.com) and, by gosh, found the missing article and it did, in
fact, answer my questions, and also mentioned that the reason I got no
answer from the progammer was that the latter was still away in New
Zealand.

Well, long story.  But the point is that the newsgroups are a terrific
resource for getting obscure information, and it was only by sheer luck
that I got the information in this case.

EarthLink--straighten up your act!

Herb 


In article <Xxah4.6465$Wn2.150094@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
"Bruce Adler" <bruce.NxOxSxPxAxMx.adler@acm.org> wrote:

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>Earthlink must be "upgrading" again because I see that the percentage
>of missing articles in my favorite newsgroup is again over 20%.
>
>Earthlink's latest trick was to drop a bunch of active newsgroups and
>then let their tech support phone answers deny for a few hours that they
>ever remove any newsgroups.  I can just barely fathom how some misinformed
>netnews administrator might assume that removing *inactive* newsgroups
>might somehow be useful and manage to fat-finger the command and remove
>a bunch of *active* newsgroups at the same time. But AFAIK any reasonable
>netnews server (and even INND) doesn't waste any significant amount of
>resources on inactive newsgroups. So while performing an essentially
>pointless bit of server maintainence Earthlink managed to royally screw
>up, again. Even if we assume that deleting inactive newsgroups is somehow
>useful I can't begin to understand how that could possibly be a higher
>priority than figuring out why Earthlink lost about 35% of the posted
>articles (in all newsgroups) during the past week.
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-- 
Herb and/or Lee Kanner
For e-mail reply, replace "acmd" by "acm"

kanner@acmd.org