Google Groups Has Been Left To Die

An anonymous reader shares a blog: Google Groups is dying. Its epitaph is not yet inscribed on the Killed by Google website, but the end is easily seen from here (although it should also be noted its death was called as early as 13 years ago). The deficiencies in Google Groups search, supposedly Google's forte, have long been noted. Lately though basic features have just stopped working. Why care? Google Groups is, for whatever reason, the de-facto standard community website in the formal methods community. TLA+ uses it, PRISM uses it, SMT-LIB uses it, and a number of other tools I could find at least have presences on the platform. These communities take time to build: their value resides in the number of people who think of them first whenever they want to ask a question or just talk about these tools. Many websites link to these groups or to specific answers. What's broken? Beyond search's perpetual brokenness, Monospace fonts have just stopped rendering. This makes code samples significantly more difficult to read. Then (precipitating this post) messages or replies submitted to the group have started intermittently just self-deleting. Not in a graceful way, either: the post will successfully be submitted, but then all that will show up is a deleted message. Hope you didn't spend twenty minutes typing a thorough, detailed response! My attempt to submit a link to this very post also deleted itself.

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