Re: [OT] Eternal September question

On 2025-03-28 01:16:23 +0000, Pluted Pup said:

On Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:11:58 -0700, super70s wrote:

What OS are you on? You can use the free Unison if you aren't past
Mojave 10.14.6.

 I can't, because I updated the OS. Unison has a wonderful
feature of clicking (or was it double clicking?) on the first
post of a thread and the entire thread loads in the background and
large threads can be paged down easily as if it were one post,
and then goes back to the article selector at the end of the thread.
I can't remember if any other newsreader had that feature, as it
was a nice surprise.
 Unison is bad at subject searching because it did not
find subjects where the subject had been changed in
the middle of a thread, it could only find the original
subject in a thread.
 Hogwatcher is the worst at searching, it has none but a
within article search and prevents users from using the
OS to search. It also forces unwanted formatting on
posts: I cannot display ascii art or show two white
spaces in a row. I always put two spaces before a
new sentence but it never shows up in my posts.

I also have another active system running Tiger 10.4 from 2006, mainly so I can run some of the old Classic apps I still find very useful. It uses an old NewsWatcher variant, MT-NewsWatcher 3.5.3b, that can do all those searches you describe. Some say NewsWatcher was the best newsreader ever developed on any platform, Mac or PC. Unfortunately it stopped being developed around that time and won't work on the newer systems at all.

I don't think I've ever used Thunderbird in any capacity and certainly
not on OSX, however I'm a huge Firefox fan and (unlike Chrome) they
still support my OS (just downloaded the latest auto-update as a matter
of fact).

 Thunderbird has the errant design of combining an email reader
with a newsreader, though those functions are unrelated.
 Oddly enough, all the newsreaders software make it easier to
post than to read news, as I can actually post with otherwise
defective newsreaders. This might explain a lot of the Usenet content
I see.

Yeah on that Tiger system I use an email client called "TenFourBird," a fork of Thunderbird. I never used its Usenet function though since NewsWatcher worked so well.