Re: Plausibility Check


Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:

What is "kiilrating"? I've been sentenced to google groups for about
three weeks now, and I haven't found any evidence of such a thing.

Sentenced? I like the Google groups. The bugs of the new interface
have been removed, now it works fine.

I know nothing of "new" vs. "old" interface, but this "new" interface
most certainly does not work "fine."

Years ago I tried to read
messages via Netscape.

People made fun of me for continuing to use Netscape 3.04, but it is
vastly superior to google groups -- but it's not available to me.
Netscape shows me only the new messages that have been posted since the
last time I looked, it allows me to "mark as read" individual messages
or entire threads or any part of them that I don't want to bother
looking at, and it doesn't lag minutes, hours, or days behind.

Made me desperate. Once I subscribed
to a mailing list, whereupon my e-mail account was flooded. With

Not the fault of mailing lists, but of the one you chose. I have been
receiving ANE List and its successor ANE-2 List, and LINGUIST List, for
years; and a variety of others on which there is little traffic --
Writing Systems, Aramaic, History of Linguistics, etc. (which tend to
be yahoo groups). They are a valuable, and vital, conduit for
up-to-date information.

Google I have it easy. I just open the threads I am interested in,
no flooding of my e-mail account, no need to killfile anyone.

And no sure way to locate all and only the new messages since last
looking in: If the list is arranged in threading order ("by reply"), it
automatically goes to the most recent posting (group), making it easy
to miss ones buried in the middle of the indentations of earlier
threads (e.g. ekkehard's introduction of "Brittonic"). If it is
arranged in chronological order, links with the past are obscured and
it can take quite a while to figure out what is a response to what.
And, of course, its "counts" of new messages are useless.

The only problem I have with Google is the rating facility in the
scientific groups. Log in, browse sci.lang or another group, place
the cursor on the five empty stars ***** under a message, and you
can see pop up the following explanations (quoted from memory):

* poor quality, I would not recommend this message
to a friend

** below average

*** average

**** above average

***** excellent, I would recommend this message to a friend

So there is in fact no such thing as "killrating." It is a fantasy of
your own.

When Google installed the rating facility in February or March
of this year, I immediately foresaw what will happen: some
people will downrate every message of mine. And it did happen.

No, no message begins with a rating. You are not "downrated."

Some people follow me everywhere and systematically give
me one star for poor quality. Look up the last messages of
my etymological thread (glossary of the new Magdalenian words)
and you know what I mean. Here in this thread someone followed
our heated discussion and gave us 3 stars each. Then one of
my killraters found that I don't deserve three stars for average,
and gave a series of my messages one star each, systematically
bringing down my rating from 3 to only 2 stars. However, he missed
one message, and so I pointed it out to him.

If I were going to bother to "rate" postings, I too would give the
etymological thread a rating of "poor." Instead, I simply ignore it.

Killrate is an analog of killfile.

There is no such thing. Nor, I am told, is it possible to killfile a
poster or a thread in google groups.

I find the rating facility unworthy for a scientific forum, where
people must provide arguments. Many scientific groups are
simply ignoring that facility, but in sci.lang people use it for
killrating me.

No, they do not. They use it to mark nonsense "poor."

And, of course, we have no way of knowing how many people have posted
ratings; if 100 people did so, and it still came out to 1 star, then
all 100 people agreed on 1 star.

.

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