Tamar,

>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.

I'd estimate back in the heyday of CIS that we had an order of magnitude more duplicated answers than we have on the UT and newsgroups.

>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.

Reading offline certainly has a place. And even as AR as I am, I've been delivered from the need to provide my own data store of messages. *bg* I'm content now to leave these magnetic fluxes spinning on platters elsewhere in the world. Maybe someday I'll even recycle those disks with zipped OzCIS archives. *L*