Slashdot Mirror

I hope so. I've been thinking about it recently.

You can get a free text-only Usenet account here:
https://www.eternal-september....

Then install and configure Pan or Thunderbird.

Also free accounts at http://www.aioe.org/ and if you don't mind paying, http://www.astraweb.com/ where I payed $10 for 25GBs. 25GBs is a lot of text posts.

The NNTP protocol was designed for this very purpose in mind. Mailing lists are only a good option if you only have a hand full of users and you are ok with the idea of managing mailng stuff back and forth by yourself. For online forums the best solution out there is good old Usenet, or at least a NNTP server.

To get a hold of a group which can be accessed through a NNTP interface and you don't want to set up your own server, you have essentially two options: gmane and aioe.org.

With gmane, you really don't have to do nothing, as their service consists of providing a gateway to mailing lists which are already up and running.

The good folks at aioe.org do a bit more than that. They provide a service which they call local group, which is basicallly a request for the server admin to create a newsgroup just for you, which is only available through aioe.org's servers and isn't shared with the rest of the Usenet. You can have moderated groups if you wish. And best of all, they are free.

Why is it so obvious that it isn't being done to fight spam? Virtually all of the newsgroups out there, outside of the moderated ones, have been completely overrun with spam. There is no really effective spam-control device for Usenet other than moderated groups, and it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum.

First of all, your allegation that "virtually all of the newsgroups out there", except the moderated ones, "have been completely overrun with spam" is as true as claiming that all email has been completely overrun with spam. You only happen to see spam hitting a newsgroup if you happen to rely on a usenet service provider which, quite blatantly, doesn't employ the most rudimentary spam filter available. There are quite a fair share of usenet service providers, including free ones such as aioe that do a good job filtering spam to an extent that in practice you will never come across spam.

Then your allegation that it's virtually impossible to maintain a good conversational flow in a moderated forum doesn't hold water. After all, all web forums are moderated in some form or another, including slashdot, and that never stopped people from participating. In some extreme cases you may get a bit of lag getting your post to appear available but that doesn't happen in practice. For example, Trolltech's newsgroup server requires a registration and I believe is moderated but still my posts are made available faster than they appear in "regular" usenet groups such as comp.lang.c, which is open to all.

Moreover, Microsoft's case is one of providing technical help regarding their products. Good conversational flow doesn't quite apply there, does it?

Usenet was great in its time, but its fatal flaw turned out to be an inability to keep out spam. We fought it for years, but the fact is the spammers have won, and it's time to move on to technologies that are better able to control it, like web forums. Yes, Usenet was much nicer back in the old days before the Internet exploded, but a lot of things online were nicer then. NNTP was developed for a world where common courtesy and community policing were sufficient to correct bad behavior, but those days are gone now as the overall population of the 'net has increased exponentially and the technology of spammers has improved so that a few of them can easily drown out the many who are willing to abide by basic netiquette rules.

I can't possibly see how the "spam has won" if I never come across a spam post on the dozens newsgroups I subscribe to. If your problem is spam then you solve it by blocking it. Or did you stopped using email altogether due to spam?

And more to the point, I find email spam, which is similar to NNTP spam, to be less intrusive than some of the animated banners that some sites shove in our screen, which means that being forced to suffer through banner ads is also an inconvenience. You can always rely on plugins such as adblock but yet, you never see anyone claiming that "the web's suffers from a fatal flaw: the inability to keep out ads".

The world changed. You can either adapt to it or sit back and complain about how things were so much better then, and how kids have no respect for people's lawns anymore. Web forums may have a long way to go before they can match the feature set on Usenet 15 years ago, but they beat the hell out of today's Usenet in terms of signal to noise ratio, and for many of us that's the more important thing.

That may be true in a couple of years from now but I have to tell you that you don't quite know what you are talking about. It's true there are already some technically-oriented sites which are boasted as being such great sources of technical insight but in practice they all suck and are still way behind what some newsgroups continually provide. For example, stack overflow

Ditto. They even support SSL (see here). For the few odd text groups I use, this free low-volume service is nice enough.

AIOE is completely free and anonymous. http://news.aioe.org/ Only text groups.

Pretty reliable, but not up 100% of the time -- it's just run by one guy as a hobby,

Teranews, http://www.teranews.com/, has a full service for several dollars a month, but also a free server you can download up to 50MB/day. You need to register and pay a one-time $3.95 fee.

There are many other servers that come and go, but these have both been around for several years.

Amen to that! The current workaround is a script known as grub-reboot. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to come by default in Fedora, but you can download it off the net if you google it. Here's the man page