SHIVER ME TIMBERS wrote:

In T'Bird, I enter 'garden' in the search field above the newsgroups
list, and only the newsgroups with 'garden' in their names will show.

Now let me get this straight.

You open the program and see a list of all the tens of thousands of
newsgroups.

Not on T'bird - there I see only the NGs I've subscribed to (seven at
the moment.) But on Free Agent, I saw the complete list. Why? i hadn't
subscribed to any of them through free Agent yet, so why did it show me
all the NGS? Dumb design IMO. Especially since there a no obvious way to
prune that list so as to find just the groups you might want to
subscribe to.

You type gardens into the search engine and only see the one or two
groups about gardening.

You click on your favourite gardening group and voila you are here and
ready to start reading the news.

Yeah, if it's in the Subscribed tree.

If that's the case..... I don't know what to say.

Not surprised.

On my Macintosh.... with my arcaic newsreader.... I can tell it to show
the full group list and search for a particular group just like you.

BUT.... I then tell the program to set up a brand new untitled group
window and I then drag the title of the group I'm interested in to the
new group window and save that window as whatever I wish to call it.

T'bird automatically adds the susbcribed group to the existing list. I
click on NG in that list, and see All headers, or just the Unread ones,
or whatever. I see no point in setting up a separate folder for a group.

Gardens for example.

If I open up my new gardens group window it opens up and there it is
containing only the garden groups I put in there.

I don't subscribe to enough groups to make that useful. Right now, I'm
subscribed to seven groups.

Your doing something radically wrong if your starting your newsgroup day
off with the full newsgroup list that on my system is about ninety
thousand long.

Ok, I'll expand:

I started Free Agent, and it showed me all the NGs, which I found odd,
since I hadn't subscribed to any of them. I hunted around, and found no
obvious way of getting a subset of that list showing only those with
'garden' (for example) in their names. Ann says it's under Tools, which
is OK, but then why show all NG list on start-up?

In T'bird, you see only the NGs you've subscribed to until you go to
Manage Newsgroup Subscriptions, at which point you see a window with all
the NGs, and a scroll bar, plus a filter box so you can select only
those NGs you want to see, and maybe subscribe to. Free Agent's design
philosophy is different, I guess.

I hope I've explained it clearly enough.