Allen said:
I think the subject says it all.
Not really. There are general-topic newsgroups but there are also
specific-topic newsgroups, like those that discuss motherboards (with
some targeting specific brands), modems, BIOS, digital cameras,
overclocking, networking, peripherals (as a general category), printers,
scanners, soundcards, videocards, CD-ROMS, and specific types of
computers (PCs, AS400, Amiga, IBM, Mac).
I have some questions re various expansion cards
Video cards? Soundcards? Modems? Something else? Without you giving
any details about WHAT type of expansion cards you want to discuss,
maybe you haven't a clue yet on what you want to discuss and want to
start in the general-topic groups, some of which are:
alt.comp.hardware
alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt
alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
You could just enter ".hardware" in your newsreader when reviewing its
list of newsgroups that it retrieved from the NNTP server (refresh the
list to make sure you have the latest list) to see which newsgroups
discuss some hardware. Since you're asking about unidentified
daughtercards, you might also want to search on ".periph".
and I would love to find a newsgroup with a low
troll/jerk/know-it-all-who-knows nothing/general creep to helpful
posters ...
Not possible in Usenet unless you're interested only in moderated
newsgroups (which typically means your post will have to go through a
validation process to inspect before allowing the submission which means
a delay in seeing your post show up). Moderated newsgroup have
".moderated" somewhere in their name, typically at the end of the name.
At that point if looking at moderated newsgroups and you find they are
infrequently updated or dead, what you asked for devolves to use forums
(and not just those that leech from Usenet using an HTTP-to-NNTP gateway
to pretend they have a larger community which means you're back to
Usenet with the problem with the signal-to-noise ratio you mentioned).
Regardless of how clean a newsgroup is now, some asshole that decides to
flood the group with trash posts can easily generate lots of noise - so
it's up to you whether you filter or not. For example, there's
Bullwinkle in 24hoursupport.helpdesk, Panzke in the Vista group, Pooh
Cat in the freeware group, and their various nyms along with all the
nymshifters/forgers/spammers hiding behind remailers and proxies or a
free Google Groups account or the unregistered (no account, no login)
free NNTP servers. While some go away after time (or reappear under
another nym), some are very entrenched in the groups where they intend
to corrupt and won't go away for years because they refuse to mature or
get a life outside their wasted time to deluge a group with their crap
posts. Make sure you resist the temptation to feed the trolls since
that's where they get their fun. They hate being ignored. Once you get
the flavor of someone's identity in Usenet, it's up to you whether you
want to entangle yourself in their peurile tactics or just skip over the
noise and move on.
Because of the availability of free NNTP servers, web-based forums (also
free) that leech from/to Usenet, lack of policy enforcement by the free
or paid NNTP providers (or no effective policy that addresses content
posted by their users), and because Usenet was designed under a
free-for-all trust model along with NNTP providers not supplying
sufficient info for users to track who is posting (which requires the
posters login into an account), you had better get used to Usenet being
an anarchy of various types of posters. If you're unwilling to define
filters to get rid of most of the junk then train your eyes to skip past
any topic or any poster whose content you don't want to see.
So why are you averse to maintaining a kill file (filter list)? That's
the only way to provide your own noise filter. Granted Tbird isn't
great (it got better in v3 by letting you test on any header) but I
don't recall that it lets you use regular expressions to be sure on just
what part of a header's value on which you are testing. It typically
takes less than a dozen filters to eliminate a predominate majority of
noise in Usenet. Just getting rid of Google Groupers and remailer
posters will reduce the noise sufficiently. Thereafter you can focus on
particular posters (although if they nymshift the task is more difficult
but not impossible but depends on the filtering features in your
newsreader).
