FAQ's
Prodigy makes it easy to read the FAQ(s) for a newsgroup. When you start
to read a newsgroup, you see a "Read FAQ" button. If you click on it, you
get a list of articles to read. I suppose it checks for articles cross-
posted to news.answers.
FAQ's aren't kept around; they are expired like regular articles. One of
the administrators did indicate that Expires headers are honored, so
properly posted FAQ's should always be available.
In addition to the newsgroup-level FAQ's, some general FAQ's are available
when you first go into the newsgroup-reading section. I don't remember
what they all are, but they looked familiar from news.announce.newusers.
MODERATED GROUPS
It is possible to distinguish moderated groups from unmoderated groups, and
postings to moderated groups seem to be handled correctly.
It would be nice if posting to a moderated group resulted in a message
saying "Your article has been submitted to a moderator and will not appear
immediately", but the other newsreaders I use don't do that either.
CENSORSHIP
They may be practicing the censorship for which Prodigy is known, but it
wasn't obvious. The alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* newsgroups were there.
GENERAL LOOK AND FEEL
Prodigy seems to be making an effort to avoid getting the reputation
for clueless users that AOL has developed.
They have subject threading.
You can set up a killfile by sender, but not by subject.
The newsgroup area is not as cartoonish as some other parts of Prodigy.
It uses normal fonts, and advertisements aren't scattered everywhere.
The bulletin board areas (the Prodigy equivalent of Compuserve's forums)
are pretty bad, or perhaps the the underlying design philosophy just
escapes me. They're still cartoony, as is internal mail (I didn't try
Internet mail).
--I read today that Prodigy is having another layoff, about 100 of their 700 employees, and they have yet to make money.
------------- Jack Hamilton jfh@crl.com KD6TTL '92 K75RTA co-moderator, sci.med.aids
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