I get it now. I apologize for not doing my homework first. I looked
up "usenet" on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USENET.
I also looked up "google groups":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups.
I guess the only way to filter by complete usenet news group message
headers
is through NNTP servers. Feeds from Google Groups do not contain the full
message headers. I had imagined that it might have been possible to
access the
Google Groups' "More options">"Show original" message without having to go
through the Google Groups web interface. That explains why the feeds from
Google are faster, because they don't contain as much data as NNTP feeds.
I also found out that the best way to get the most complete list of new
messages on any usenet news group is to use multiple NNTP servers. I am
already using: news.motzarella.org and drooper.mixmin.net, both of
which
have worked very well, most of the time. It's just once in a blue moon
that a
message won't show up on one server or the other. Then I will look to see
if
it made it on Google Groups, and there it is like clockwork. That's why I
had
hoped the Google feeds would work. But that was a pipe dream.
I guess some of the free NNTP servers selectively filter messages
containing
certain headers known for heavy spam traffic, "message-id:*googlegroups*,"
and
"references:*googlegroups*" being the most notorious. They say
"usenet4all"
is doing this.
But I prefer to do my own filtering through NewsProxy. I have tested
"motzarella" and "mixmin" by renaming the nfilter.dat file under the
NewsProxy
Edit>Configuration menu, stop, start, then download the last 1000 messages
in
busy groups known for spammers and trollers. I count the number of
messages,
highlight and delete them, then restore the nfilter.dat entry and repeat
the
process, to compare how well my NewsProxy filters are working. The ratio
is
about 300 to 1, that one post gets through for every three hundred posts
that
get filtered on the busiest groups.
I will forget all about Google Groups "feeds" and "feed readers."
Usenet
would be worthless without being able to selectively filter on all message
headers, to keep the spammers and trolls away.
--
Ckyp
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