Can we talk about Info Select?

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Feb 9, 2014 at 09:48 AM

@Alexander Deliyannis and @jimspoon: SOLVED - the mystery of the disappeared RSS feed for the Yahoo! InfoSelect User Group forum.
RSS feeds to Groups seems to have been silently (without prior announcement/warning) removed by Yahoo! sometime in July 2013. This is according to the Admin’s post in the discussion thread “Is RSS gone”, here: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-groups/suggestions/4240849
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Completed · Admin Product Support (Admin, Yahoo) responded · Sep 1, 2013
Hi John , The RSS feature was retired in July 2013.
- Yahoo! Groups Product Team
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Words fail me, but I am not surprised.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th Ed.) defines “yahoo” thusly:
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yahoo:
* n. informal a rude, coarse, or brutish person.
– ORIGIN C18: from the name of an imaginary race in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
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Oh no! Eyes hazing over with red…anger…must destroy…cannot stop…nooooooo!...not that!...not a rant!...
START OF RANT=================
Though I tend be highly critical and analytical, I do try to be positive about most things, but, after observing the Yahoo! “marketing” methods, I came to the conclusion many years ago that Yahoo! was detestable and to be avoided. So I made a deliberate decision - I steadfastly blocked *any* advertising links to, or feeds from them in my browser, using JunkBuster and, later, AdBlockPlus, and when my ISP tried to force me to migrate my email account to an inferior and less secure (QED) Yahoo! email account, I steadfastly refused and to this day I still use the old email account.
However, I did nevertheless periodically (every year or so) review this decision and examine what Yahoo! currently seemed to have on offer, and whether they had improved, but nothing indicated that my original decision was not the right one for me.
I grudgingly only used Yahoo! for this *one thing* - the InfoSelect user group. I avoided going to the detested Yahoo! user group site unless I felt I had something useful/helpful/informative to contribute, and I kept-up-to-date on the discussion threads via RSS feed - as I do with OutlinerSoftware.com and the other forums, blogs and news sites that I wish to keep updated by.

Anyway, now that I know for sure that Yahoo! have deliberately expunged RSS feeds in the forums - presumably to force users to go to the blasted things (clicks and eyes on pages presumably being the all-important drivers), I can use an alternative that I always use for sites that do not have an RSS feed but that I want to keep informed by (and no, email alerts don’t cut the mustard as far as I am concerned) - a Firefox extension called UpdateScanner - http://sourceforge.net/projects/updatescanner/
END OF RANT=================