"John Fowler" wrote ...
Raymond was wondering why people keep "jumping ahead"
in the Harvey Gerst thread.

It's a funcion of how the newsreader orders things Raymond,
so going to roadrunner will not change anything there. It's
essentially a 'most recent poster' ordering.

NNTP is a very ancient, pre-internet protocol. It uses a
"store-n-forward" technology developed decades before
the P2P filesharing of today. Distribution of messages is
"best-effort" and carries absolutely no guarantees that any
message will arrive in any particular order (or even to
arrive at all).

The timestamps are those of the sending computers and if
your computer clock is a few minutes (or hours, days, or even
years) off, your message may appear to be "out of order".

And then there are dozens/scores of different newsreader
client applications which may or may not display the
messages in the sequence you would prefer.

Another option you might try is accessing groups through
google. Some here have tried it and said that they didn't
like it, but don't say why. I like it because it reads in HTML,
which allows me to use my preferred larger amber colored
fonts over a charcoal background. Much easier on the eyes.

Note that while Google Groups uses HTML to display certain
formatting on your browser screen, NEVER actually post HTML
(or "rich text" of any kind) to the newsgroups. Most text-only
newsgroups like this one abhor anything beyond plaintext.