Google Groups

Google Groups is a service from Google Inc. that supports discussion groups, including many Usenet newsgroups, based on common interests. Membership in Google Groups is free of charge and many groups are anonymous. Users can find discussion groups related to their interests and participate in threaded conversations, either through a web interface or by e-mail. They can also start new groups. Google Groups also includes an archive of Usenet newsgroup postings dating back to 1981 and supports reading and posting to Usenet groups. Users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere.

History

In February 2001, Google acquired Deja News, which provided a search engine to access an archive of Usenet newsgroup articles. Users were then able to access these Usenet newsgroups through the new Google Groups interface. By the end of 2001 the archive had been supplemented with other archived messages dating back to 11 May 1981. These early posts from 1981-1991 were donated to Google by the University of Western Ontario, based on archives by Henry Spencer from the University of Toronto. Shortly after, Google released a new version, which allowed users to create their own (non-Usenet) groups.

In February 2006, Google modified the interface of Google Groups, adding profiles and post ratings.

In October 2010, Google announced it would be dropping support for welcome messages, pages, and files effective January 2011.

Kinds of groups hosted by Google

Google provides two distinct kinds of groups: traditional Usenet groups, and non-Usenet groups that are more similar to mailing lists. The latter type is accessible only by web or by e-mail, not by NNTP. The Google Groups user interface and help messages do not use a distinct name for mailing-list style groups, referring to both styles of group as "Google Groups."

Google recognizes the X-No-Archive header and displays messages containing it for only seven days, after which the article becomes no longer available to the public. Google also recognizes the "-- " Usenet signature delimiter, and removes the significant space at the end (thus, proper Usenet signatures can't be added to articles posted via Google Groups).

Notable interface features

Groups search

Google Search incorporates public groups into its results. Searches return the posts which most match the search query, and if any groups match, they will be displayed at the top of the results with a link to the Google Groups directory.

Profiles

Users may create public profiles which are linked from all of their posts.

Rating posts

A user can rate a post with 1 to 5 out of 5 stars. A post's rating is based on the average of all the user ratings it gets, and a thread's rating is based on the average rating of all the posts in the thread. Users may not rate their own posts.

Starring threads

Users may mark up to 200 threads as "starred" to track them centrally.

E-mail masking

To prevent scammers or spammers from harvesting e-mail addresses from a group, Google masks all e-mail addresses on its web interface by replacing up to the last 3 characters of the username with no less than three dots. To view the full e-mail address, a user must respond to a CAPTCHA challenge. E-mail addresses are only masked when viewing a Google Group or Usenet newsgroup through the web interface, never when subscribers receive messages by e-mail, nor when the Usenet articles are distributed to other servers. Google Groups does not allow users to obfuscate their own e-mail addresses.

Group web pages

The group pages were introduced in the beta version of October 5, 2006 (promoted from beta status on January 24, 2007). They can be edited by group members or group managers and can store files for download. Versions of pages are kept in a similar way to a Wiki. On September 22, 2010 Google announced plans for turning off the group pages suggesting users to move their content to Google Docs or Google Sites. Starting in November 2010, the group pages will become read-only (allowing only viewing/downloading existing content) while in February 2011 they will be turned off completely.

Official Google Groups

Google has created several official help groups for some of its services, such as Gmail. In these groups, users can ask and answer questions about the relevant Google service. Each official group has a Google representative who occasionally responds to queries. Google representatives always have a blue G symbol in their nicknames.

Some official groups include:

Google Groups Help Forum: was an official Google Groups help group until August 2, 2010, when it was archived (made read-only).

Google Page Creator Discussion Group: an official Google Page Creator help group.

Google also uses Google Groups to host their Google Friends and Google Page Creator Updates mailing lists, which are announcement-only groups where only moderators can post.

There are also help forums, which appear to have different functionality from Google Groups:

Gmail Help Forum: an official Gmail help forum.

Google Talk Help Forum: an official Google Talk help forum.

Google Base Help Forum: an official Google Base help forum.

Google Web Search Help Forum: an official Google search help forum.

Google Webmaster Help Forum: an official help forum for webmasters.

AdWords Help Forum: an official Google AdWords help forum.

Google Maps Forum: an official Google Maps help forum.

Criticism

The late Lee Rizor, also known as "Blinky the Shark," started the Usenet Improvement Project, a project which is highly critical of Google Groups and its users. The project aims to "make Usenet participation a better experience." They have accused Google Groups of turning a blind eye to an "increasing wave of spam" from its servers and of encouraging an Eternal September of "lusers" and "lamers" arriving in established groups en masse. The Usenet Improvement Project provides several killfile examples to block messages posted by Google Groups users in several newsreaders.

On 16 October 2003, John Wiley & Sons sent a letter to Google after discovering that copyrighted text from a book they published was made available for download on a Google group.

Slashdot and Wired contributors have criticized Google for its inattention to a search engine for Google Groups, leaving many older postings virtually inaccessible.

Outages

This section needs references that appear in reliable third-party publications. Primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please add more appropriate citations from reliable sources. (September 2009)

For about one week starting August 19, 2009, Google Groups did not send new articles to moderation for moderated Usenet groups such as comp.lang.c++.moderated, causing a severe reduction of traffic in those groups. A second such outage occurred from September 16–23, 2009. A Google representative acknowledged the problem on September 22, 2009 in a posting to the Google help forums.

Since November 24, 2009, outages still persist on Google Groups. Pages are being lost the moment they are published and e-mail notifications are yielding broken links. Even though the "Is Something Broken" support forum is full of complaints, Google has not acknowledged or acted to fix the problem.

Blocking

Google Groups has been blocked in Turkey since April 10, 2008 by the order of a court in Turkey.[ According to The Guardian, the court banned Google Groups following a libel complaint by Adnan Oktar against the service. Google Groups was the first of several websites to be blocked by the Turkish Government in rapid succession solely for including material which allegedly offended Islam.

See also

BigTent Groups

Yahoo! Groups

MSN Groups (closed)

(source:wikipedia0