In the postings about the tanker sinking yesterday, seems that seems
that some of you get the postings and respond in a very timely manner.
Buy the time I read (get) the posts they are hours old. Could someone
please explain this to me?
Thanks,
John (DKMAC)

"WetOne" wrote in message
om...
In the postings about the tanker sinking yesterday, seems that seems
that some of you get the postings and respond in a very timely manner.
Buy the time I read (get) the posts they are hours old. Could someone
please explain this to me?
Thanks,
John (DKMAC)

It looks like you are posting via Google groups. that is a known 'feature'
You need to post thru your ISP (or other news service) to get your posts to
show up faster.

Marc

WetOne ) writes:
In the postings about the tanker sinking yesterday, seems that seems
that some of you get the postings and respond in a very timely manner.
Buy the time I read (get) the posts they are hours old. Could someone
please explain this to me?
Thanks,
John (DKMAC)

There is no central server for the newsgroups. You post at your site, and
every so often the site sends out a batch of accumulated messages. It
goes to the next site over, and from there to the next site over, and so on
and so on. Originally, starting over twenty years ago, this was done via
regular phone calls, but now of course it's done over the internet. But
it does take time for any message to propogate, depending on the path the
message takes and how many hops it has to make, and various other factors.

So you can see a situation where you see answers before first messages
in a thread appear. Someone saw the original message first, responded,
and the route the reply took made it get to your site before the original
message.

But, I suspect you're posting from dejanews/gooogle. It's an archive,
not intended as a regular newsserver. They update the archive in batches,
every four hours or so (I place them at about 9:30am, 1:30pm, 5:30pm, 9:30pm,
1:30am and 5:30am, all EST). If you post from dejanews/google, and post
too close to the next update, your message will not appear in the next update,
but the one after that. I've not yet been able to figure out the exact
deadline for getting in the next update, but I'd say an hour ahead of time
is fine. If you post relatively soon after the last update, you can be
certain it will show up in the next update.

An important thing to note, because it does confuse people, is that
if you post from dejanews/google, your message leaves their system as
soon as you post, even if it doesn't show up in their archive for some hours.
So others can see and read the message, and reply, though you won't see
them till the next update if you are reading messages at dejanews/google.
This means that you will often see replies to your own messages along
with your original message in the next update.

It used to be that many/most ISPs would have a newsserver. Over the years,
I've seen plenty of messages such as yours, where the poster doesn't even
realize there are other ways to read newsgroups besides dejanews/google.
So you want to check with your ISP to see if they have a newsserver,
and then run a newsreader application on your computer to access the
newsgroups.

But sadly, there are an increasing number of ISPs that are not offering
a newsserver. So then you either have to change ISPs, use dejanews/google,
buy access to an independent newsserver, or find a free newsserver.

Michael