This is why:
These groups are accessable by more than one protocol.
You are looking at the groups through the HTML interface, which is pointed
to in the help for the product.
If you read the explanatory material at the top of the initial page reached
via that link, you'll see that the groups are also reachable via NNTP.
There are a great many NNTP newsreader programs--one which comes with every
copy of Windows is Outlook Express.
Reading the groups with a newsreader has many advantages--you can download
and read offline, you can download and maintain a store of all messages, and
search those messages locally on your own machine, or let a desktop search
engine do that work for you.
In this instance, there's no link in the left column to see. I use the html
interface occasionally, but rather infrequently--it is very annoying and
unproductive to use. If I had to use such an interface regularly, I'd
probably have about 1/4 the posts I have in these groups. There are
improved HTML interfaces, and we may see some improvements later in this
beta, but even the newer interface is quite slow to use compared to an NNTP
client.
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