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Rob Reiner wrote: > . . . one advantage of a >newsgroup that no one has mentioned - its simple accessibility may >help draw a much larger following. When I was first diagnosed with >PD, my first act was to search for "the" relevant newsgroup. . . . This is a strong reason for having a newsgroup. I would guess that a large percentage of the Internet population consists of people who are new to this mode of communication and are still finding their way around. Newsgroups may be more visible and easier to locate than mailing lists. The increasing use of the web and prominence of web search facilities like Yahoo may change this, however. There are a number of disadvantages to newsgroups. - Mailing list postings, because they go by e-mail, reach the recip- ients in much less than an hour - often within a few minutes. News- group postings travel a different route, and can take a day or two. - News is subject to limitations and quirks of whatever internet access provider you use: - The time period during which newgroup postings are available at the internet access provider sites at which we retrieve them is limited by the individual sites' storage capacities, which may mean in some cases just a few days. There are ways to retrieve older postings elsewhere, e.g., http://www.dejanews.com, but not everyone knows this. - A few customers of the access provider I use have complained of not receiving all their news. - On one occasion my access provider had to delete several days of news while changing hardware, since copying over all the news to the new hardware would have taken them two days. Phil