[Gary Eickmeier]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
Gary Eickmeier wrote:

I don't know about that, but I just read this group on Google Groups
while at work, and was floored. There was a button called "Profile"
so I thought I would see what my "profile" was. The *******s have
published every Google search I have ever done, every message I have
written in Newsgroups, no matter what the topic. This is outrageous.
I may frequent several groups which have nothing to do with each
other, and I may not want what I talked about in one to be read by
all of my friends in other groups. It's kind of like forwarding your
remarks to one person to someone else without my permission.

It's the whole point of Google Groups.

What happened was... Usenet ran and ran for a decade or so, and then
in
the early nineties when the Web became popular, Altavista started an
online Usenet archive to make those Usenet messages indexable and
available.

At this time, a lot of people pitched in to help Altavista with old
postings. Lots of people sent their personally stored messages.
Henry Spencer at
utzoo had backed his usenet spool up to tape for several years and he
sent those in. The denizens of talk.bizarre basically collected
their own personal archives together and sent them in. It was
great... you could look up stuff going back to the mid-eighties in
many cases.

Then google bought the Altavista archives, and they kept the same
basic system (although unfortunately they screwed the indices up so
you can no longer do keyword searches on messages from before 2000).
The whole point though, was archives of postings.

Then Google added a nifty gadget that allowed people to post, which
very quickly turned into a spam problem, then they added this silly
thing that made it look like a proprietary system they ran, rather
than an interface into a huge distributed system.

But the whole point, the original purpose of Google Groups was to
archive usenet messages, to index them, and to make them searchable.
It's been
that way since about 1992. If you don't like this, don't post to
Usenet,
but from my perspective it's one of the things that has made Usenet so
useful and interesting. If only they'd fix the damn indices, clean up
their interface, and deal with their spam problem.

Has anyone else seen this?

I helped write the first version, back when it was running on
someone's personal desktop at decwrl.
--scott

OK, well thanks for the info, but how would you like every letter you ever
wrote to anyone published to the world for their wandering eyes to see? Can
you opt out or edit it? I looked briefly in the Dashboard and didn't see an
option.

Gary Eickmeier