>Offline readers end up being a huge waste of time and effort. I used to use OZCis and OZWin before I got unlimited internet access because I had to make a long distance call to a 1200bps CIS node and CIS charged per minute. But that ended up answering questions that had already been answered since I made the "read" pass.
>
>Now here at the UT and the newsgroups I can see in realtime if a question has already been sufficiently answered I don't have to spend time writing a reply.

The issue of someone answering since you downloaded is real, but I don't find it to happen that much. And, for that matter, it can happen on the UT, too, though the window is smaller.

For me, the benefit of an offline reader is that I have all the messages stored in my machine so when I remember that I've since a message on a particular topic, I can easily look it up, whether or not I have a connection. In addition, I can grab all the messages and take them with me. I've read a lot of CompuServe messages on planes.

Tamar