posted on Thursday, December 23, 2004 8:43 PM
by
amachanic
Help fix Google Groups
Any regular user of Google Groups has now had to suffer through the pain of using their new "beta" system. Basically, it sucks. They've ruined a totally perfect system.
So I'd like to ask everyone to please tell them about it!
I'm hoping that if we get enough requests in, they'll at least fix some of the more obvious problems:
A) Brought to my attention by Steve Kass is this little issue caused by their attempt at thwarting e-mail address harvesting... If you post this code block:
return cast(@x%@two_32_N*@two_N + @x/@two_32_N as binary(4))
... and then search for the message, this is what you'll see:
return cast(@x...@two_32...@two_N + @x...@two_32_N as binary(4))
That totally ruins any old code (that has variables) in the SQL Server group archives. Very annoying.
B) A smaller issue that I've noticed is that their new UI includes very little indication of where one message ends and the next begins when viewing a thread. The old system had a large horizontal rule between messages. I'm sure their designers think that the new, tiny headers are "cleaner" looking, but instead they've ruined usability of scrolling through longer threads.
C) Search just doesn't seem to work as well anymore. I seem to be getting a lot more unrelated hits than I used to.
Other problems people are having? Please leave them in the comments so we can all send nice big lists to Google...