Using news groups is ok IF it's only one or two of them, if, as I do, you subscribe to quite a lot then it becomes almost a full time occupation to read all of the posts. Since in most cases only about 40% of posts have any interest to anyone person, the time, effort and trouble becomes too much and the whole thing implodes. Most of the sites I receive in digest form via 2 or 3 emails a day which means I can at least pick out the posts of interest to me from the digest headers. The beauty of garden banter is that the forum layout enables me to see at a glance what is new, what interests me, and above all I don't have to wade through yards of quotes from the start of the thread trying to find the one line reply buried in there somewhere, in a forum you don't need to use quotes to show what you are talking about as the thread has a title that tells you. /rant. :-)