Somehow I don't find this too surprising, Google Groups was promising many years ago, but this days it is in a rather depressing state:
- Search works much worse than either inside Gmail or googling a different web archive of a mailinglist (I think this has improved a bit recently, but before it was so broken as to be unusable)
- The UI was clunky, and the new (half finished, there are still parts of the site with the old one) is even clunkier (why can't people at Google even give pages proper URLs?)
- It is a spam cesspool, the only way to keep spam out of a group is to make every first email moderated, this again is strange given how well spam filtering works in Gmail.
I still tend to use it because the hassle of running a mailing list server is just not worth it, and for some reason I trusted Google wouldn't take it down any time soon (but given their track record with other products, I guess I was being naive), but is sad that Google is doing such a poor job with a product that easily could be much better.
- Search works much worse than either inside Gmail or googling a different web archive of a mailinglist (I think this has improved a bit recently, but before it was so broken as to be unusable) - The UI was clunky, and the new (half finished, there are still parts of the site with the old one) is even clunkier (why can't people at Google even give pages proper URLs?) - It is a spam cesspool, the only way to keep spam out of a group is to make every first email moderated, this again is strange given how well spam filtering works in Gmail.
I still tend to use it because the hassle of running a mailing list server is just not worth it, and for some reason I trusted Google wouldn't take it down any time soon (but given their track record with other products, I guess I was being naive), but is sad that Google is doing such a poor job with a product that easily could be much better.