Slashdot Mirror

You're thinking of RemarQ, which now has this remarQable homepage.

While I don't have actual values for the Web (which would be hard to get), here are some statistics from an ISP that runs a newsgroup server. It's a bit skewed because they don't carry the high bandwidth stuff like movies, warez, or even mp3s, but it's worth a shot.

Of course, the major Usenet providers, like EasyNews, Giganews, and RemarQ would never publish these statistics, because they would expose themselves for what they are, and why people pay for them. It certainly isn't for the text files or the discussion, that's for sure.

I'm pretty disgusted with deja, too. I liked their big archives, but hated their interface - there's nothing more annoying than waiting for a page to load, then scrolling down through 100 lines of nested, poorly differentiated text only to find one line that wasn't relevant to what I wanted to read anyway. So I started using Remarq, and got along without the big archive, unless I had to go back to deja for something old, but loved seeing 25 responses at a time. Then Remarq got bought out and are now a PAY service. Now I'm stuck with a bad interface and not enough archive to be useful.

Is there any other usenet archive service?

Their new home page Remarq does not have any closing down announcement.

So far the service is still free, as I logged in to my account without any demands for money.

Click here to avoid abc ads:

http://www.remarq.com/read/34668 /qA-hMD4JshJAC-y_G

I use http://www.remarq.com and it works nicely. It's free and it will do exactly what you need.


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A few months ago, Deja made an announcement about the site move. According to the accouncement, which has not been updated since its original release, the old messages would temporarily be taken down, but we should "have no fear: [Deja is] committed to bringing these messages back online as soon as possible.

In the meantime, Deja has been transformed into a mere free Web-based Usenet server that happens to have unusually long retention, but no binaries access.

It has been a couple of months since then. Last month, Deja announced that the move was "complete"; however, most of the old posts are still nowhere to be found. There was an interesting Usenet discussion on the state of things, which included at least one thoughtful post as well as possibly a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Perhaps not all is lost. When (if) the Deja archive ever comes back in its entirety, it will still be the best Usenet archive around, hands down.

I disagree with the Slashdot article's claim that Deja has a merely "okay search interface". As long as one uses the Deja Classic Power Search, Deja has one of the cleanest interfaces around, with extremely flexible and powerful query options.

One would be hard-pressed to come up with something better at this point. Even if one were able to cook up a better interface with even better query features, where would the content come from? Who has been archiving Usenet all these years other than Deja, Remarq, and perhaps a few other little-known entities?

I daresay that none of the current archive holders would be willing to grant archive access without considerable compensation. Unfortunately, one would have no choice; it's a little too late to start archiving the old stuff now!

All in all, I would probably be in favor of just trying to get Deja back up in its full glory; this would be so much easier than starting from scratch. Perhaps all Deja needs is to hear (from thousands of concerned Slashdot readers) that their "old" archive is their most valuable resource, and should thus be given the attention that it deserves. I personally consider the "old" archive so valuable that I would be willing to pay a subscription fee to access it; I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

So shall we all write Deja now, and let them know what we think?
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Well, if I could get a newsreader to talk past my corp firewall, I sure would prefer to use that.

I consider this trick to be the last straw. I've permanently switched to RemarQ, even though they do attach an ad to each post. RemarQ's interface, while still not a newsreader, is a lot easier to use, and noticably faster. (Not that RemarQ doesn't come with it's own ObPeeves...)

I've been relying on Deja for 3 or 4 years, since it was Deja-news. When I needed a WWW gateway to Usenet, it was the only one. Being long familiar with the standard newsreader interface, I found Deja frustrating and sometimes infuriating. They've changed the interface 3 times, and each time it's become more cumbersome, more slow, and more frustrating to use. Now, with context-sensitive linking, even more servers have to coordinate to deliver you just one message... no thanks. It's like they don't want you to use their service for browsing.

This time, their news service was flaky for ten days. If you tried to browse one of your regular group, Deja would present you with a search results screen instead: a search for keyword "*" in the newsgroup you wanted to browse, and the results were all at least two weeks old. Threads were ignored. Useless for browsing. When I emailed their support team with a "what's happening?" note, I got a reply four days later telling me it was regular database maintenance that got out of hand.

Yeah, maybe so, but when browsing came back, the newsgroups were soon buzzing with complaints about Deja's linking. I had already switched to RemarQ and was happy to have evaded it.

Thank you for contacting Deja.Com Customer Support. Thank you for your recent e-mail concerning the new feature in Deja.com's Usenet Discussion Service that detects product names in Usenet messages and hyperlinks these names to related content in Deja.com's Precision Buying Service. These hyperlinks are not sponsored advertisements, but are simply pointers to other areas of Deja.com which we hope you will find relevant and helpful as you are reading Usenet discussions.
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I think it's competitors are www.remarq.com and www.talkway.com but neither of them are quite as good...

As is obvious to everybody with one or more neurons firing, the previous poster was not Linus Torvalds, but YADTAST (Yet Another Dummer Than A Stump Troll).

That having been said, the original poster is probably referring to the 'THIS_MODULE' undeclared here error message a number of us ran into, the solution to which is here.

In short, you need to #include linux/modules.h just before the first #include asm/.. statement. An annoying buglet in the pre-release code, but easy enough to find the answer at deja.com, altavista.com, or by grepping on the contents of /usr/include.

At the very least, a bug report gets (at this point, has gotten) the bug fixed.

The ambitious goal we should set for ourselfs is: Unlocking the knowledge of humanity.

A far more sophisticated system is need then napster to acomplish this. Such a system was first discussed by V.Bush in 1945. Napster is only about sharing standard mp3 files. UseNET is also all about distribution of information. Napster is dedicated for MP3, where UseNET allows distribution of text, audio, CDROM images, etc in all forms. The current traffic volumes are around 1 GByte / day ! Compared to this volume Napster is small, yett Napster is more usefull then the special news clients that gather all MP3s from a binairy newsgroup.

A very important feature lacking in both Napster and UseNET is advanced review and moderation. Slashdot is an example of how review should work: by the people and for the people. When the produkt is becoming more diverse the need for distingtion increases. The MP3 files of Napster are fairly standard. Only the quality of the encoder matters if you rip directly of the CD. For images things become more tricky. The resolution can be checked by simple scripts, but the overall image quality must always be rated by the users. The description, quality and content of video can be entered by the user colectively. Shashdot proves that a review mechnisms on text work effectively and gems of information can be distinghished. This information is the greatest challange. Currently there are tutotials for mastering the art of C, C++, java, perl, php3, etc. programming. It would be a great leap if such writings could evolve from the work of several people on the Internet, each contributing the unique piece of knowledge and experience they own.

We therefore need to add rating and review mechanisms to the open source Napsters that distribute the knowledge and information of humanity. The mechanism of karma, and score's for the content need to be refined for the various types of information.

With such a mechanism copyright issues are no longer relevant and information can flow and evolve freely. To pay the people for their work it must be possible to send small amount of money directly to the people, instead of the big amount of money that is currently asked by the media industry. This small transfer of money should be optional.

Just my 5 eurocents,
Johan.

A quick www.remarq.com search got me the post. Here: is the short script

-d

I just got wind of this. It seems a web service for reading Usenet will be highlighting keywords within the articles displayed through their site with links to advertisers who have purchased that service. The press release from the service itself is here. It is high time to start digitally signing everything with either PGP or GPG and licensing it only for unaltered redistribution.

This comment is licensed under the OpenContent License (OPL) Version 1.0, July 14, 1998. The relevant paragraphs concerning modification are as follows:

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the OpenContent or any portion of it, thus forming works based on the Content, and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

a) You must cause the modified content to carry prominent notices stating that you changed it, the exact nature and content of the changes, and the date of any change.

b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the OC or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License, unless otherwise permitted under applicable Fair Use law.

"A few hundred gigabytes a day" is obviously
way too high, but what is it really?

I apologize -- it's "only" 90 gigabytes a day. News statistics

Well, let's see. There's Deja & Remarq just for starters.

Yahoo also has a listing of public-access USENET sites. Sadly, spammers being who and what they are, most public-access sites that allow posting soon become abused right out of existence.

For those willing to pay a bit of extra money, there is also Yahoo's commercial news server category.

There are always choices for USENET service. Even if you already pay your ISP for its USENET, additional access elsewhere isn't really all that expensive. These are also viable options for people who use free dialin services like AltaVista or Blue Light that don't provide anything beyond bare-bones dialup access.

Of course! You should complain to @Home. Do so at length, and threaten to take your business elsewhere until @Home manages to fix the problem @Home has which is hurting @Home users.

If @Home doesn't fix the problem, you really should switch, if possible. If not, there are many other solutions. The cheapest and easiest would be to read newsgroups via Dejanews or Remarq. Better solutions would be to get a Unix shell account (these are available for free some places at least).

Of course, @Home may come around, hopefully before the UDP hits on the 18th. If so, you have no problems at all.

Its not in deja.com yet, and I didn't want to reproduce it here to avoid possible copyright issues, so here is a link to it.

Any other suggestions for a good Usenet search engine?

My current choice is Deja, though I hate what's happened to the site as it's been portalized. I use an alternate page. Actually, I've created my own simplified, localhost search pages for the major search engines I frequent -- I don't actually hit the sites until I get results.

There are also tools like dejasearch which provide a command-line interface to search engines, and compile results to a single, local, file for later browsing.

That said, what alternative Usenet archives are there? I've used Remarq on the odd occasion, though it strikes me as too busy and unfriendly as well. Pity.

There is also Talkway, Randori, Extra Newsguy and Liquid Information

The list goes on an on and on.