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Spaf's Farewell, Ten Years Later
catfood writes "Ten years ago this evening, Usenet legend Gene Spafford posted his farewell to news.announce.newusers, news.misc, and a few other newsgroups. Among other things, spaf wrote: 'People don't seem to think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly violate copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature files, and do basically every other thing the postings (and common sense and common courtesy) advise not to. Regularly, there are postings of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they aren't being read.' Speaking of his own post, spaf said, 'even if it is perceived as self-indulgent garbage, it will fit right in with the rest of the net.'
Ten years later, we still have all of spaf's complaints plus mounting spammage just barely held in check by auto-canceling volunteers. Is Usenet still useful? Is it worth maintaining? I say yes, but I can feel spaf's pain. It may be too late now, but hey spaf: thanks."
his last, as opposed to first, post?
I'm generally not interested in particular groups for the purposes of dicussion, however, when I'm looking to troubleshoot something, I always use Google groups. I figure if I'm having a problem, someone else has probably had it too, and posted about it. Most of the time, I'm right, and I can find a solution (or find out there isn't one.)
Spaf... irate poster, or visionary?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Everyone knows Usenet is full of spam, trolls and people who've never mastered the subtleties of online etiquette. But don't write it off yet. It's still a fantastic place to interact, get technical support, debate the world, share common interests and grab MP3s. Just because it doesn't have a pretty GUI doesn't mean it lacks value. Usenet is the Wild West of the Internet. Use it, respect it and protect it!
Among other things, spaf wrote: 'People don't seem to think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly violate copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature files, and do basically every other thing the postings (and common sense and common courtesy) advise not to.
I actually wrote an article similar to this on my webpage that discusses the lack of common courtesy and many of the problems with discussing things in email/instant messaging and messageboard style communication. I don't think it is that people don't have common courtesty, I think it has more to do with the medium of discussion and the false sense of intimacy and the obvious sense of anonymity. I guess I focused more on instant messaging, but the same things apply for message board style posting as well.
The anti-salmon
Especially since the advent of google groups. It makes it much easier to find past posts. This gives news groups a much longer memory and, in theory, should prevent repetitive posts.
In addition, it makes USENET an extremely effective support venue. Whenever I have an unexplained error or problem with one of my machines, I just search groups.google.com and more often than not, I find that someone has had the same exact problem that I'm experiencing.What I see happening most of the times, is that advanced users have a kind of "private social club", then a lot of newbies arrives, asking questions that don't really interest the more advanced users.
It usually ends up with arguing about it, then a FAQ is made, no one reads it, then the more advanced users leave... And after a while the group isn't useful for anything else than simple answers anymore, because the persons with the skill to answer them are gone.
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
The usenet isn't completely useless but it has serious flaws such as lack of administrative control that render it completely useless on a large scale.
Where else can you find free repositories of porn, sectioned off into seperate areas, from leather to hamsters? Usenet rocks.
God is real unless declared integer.
There is too much spam, too many cross-posts, too much garbage, too little thought, etc.. As a community forum it resembles what Slashdot would if there were no moderators--just as low quality, but with the genuine stuff lost in the crowd of penis-birds and goatsecx.
Spaf was right on the money. Some of us have just been really slow to see it.
If it weren't for blatantly violating copyrights, I doubt many people would be using usenet today.
you can get advice...some times....you can search usenet for information on google, and get a quick SN for something on alt.2600.* :-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
all that happened was that usenet became a large enough phenomenon that it began to reflect society at large rather than a group of elite users.
all of spaf's complaints are the same complaints i can make about human behavior on any street corner of any city. or a complaint a roman could make about streetcorners in rome 2000 years ago.
the problem is not usenet.
the problem is moral idealists who don't understand human nature.
you don't change human nature as a whole by chastising and scolding the already-converted-to-responsible-behavior. you adopt your understanding of human nature to fit in with reality, and you make the technological changes to the medium to prevent it's abuse by the common rabble of the world. and if you can't do that, you get used to it.
welcome to the real world.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"People don't seem to think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly violate copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature files, and do basically every other thing the postings (and common sense and common courtesy) advise not to. Regularly, there are postings of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they aren't being read."
This wasn't even news 5 years ago. Hell, this wasn't even news 10 years ago, at least to me. I agree with all of it, sure. But it's the byproduct of cultural evolution. As a community gets bigger, more stupid people move in.
best web host ever
and nothing has changed
People don't seem to think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly violate copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature files, and do basically every other thing the postings (and common sense and common courtesy) advise not to.
Here's to 20 more years of a complete waste of time!
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
"Reason, etiquette, accountability, and compromise
are strangers in far too many newsgroups these days."
Same beefs, different protocol.
"Follow your Bliss." -- Joseph Campbell
With the massive proliferation of special-interest web sites and message boards (helped in no small part by quality OSS software such as apache, php, mysql and phpBB, as well as many others) usenet is becoming more and more irrelevant. Most action happens in the binaries groups where people just fire up pan or agent (or some other bin-friendly news reader) and go to town downloading software.
Another large part of this is the signal-to-noise ratio. Even though you have the cancel-bots traversing usenet, its still choked full of spam. Web-based message boards and plain old email lists that require you be authenticated before posting have done much to raise the all-important s2n ratio.
Redundant my ass. You just didn't get it.
Can't you see our own editor-in-chief expressing the same frustrations as the esteemed Spaf? It's funny, laugh.
For instance, I often read rec.humor.funny and rec.humor.funny.reruns and a few other newsgroups via google groups when I'm bored.
[URL=http://www.tubgirl.com]this[/a] epitomizes USENET's current state quite well.
Because web interfaces for threaded discussions suck shit. This is one area client side apps are superior.
Me to.
joenobody@aol.com
Now I see Usenet like a button I have: "Reading Usenet is like drinking from a firehose, posting to Usenet is like shouting at people in a passing rollercoaster, and archiving Usenet is like saving used toilet paper." Usenet is like a philosophical particle accelerator which creates opinions of such energy and instability that they could not exist in nature, and a great way of being annoyed by people I otherwise never would have met.
Now a newsgroup that gets less than 100 posts a day are ones that haven't been harvested by spammers yet. I knew it was over when in a base about Nordic culture was innundated with binaries of jpegs which I am sure were not Viking artifacts or ethnologist and museum lore.
That's why I spent my time on e-mail lists and UBB/phpBB boards. Sure, we get jerks, but well-moderated forums with e-mail verification keep a lot of idiots away.
__________________________________________________ _
"Internet is so huge and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea--massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
- Spaf, 1992
"Reason, etiquette, accountability, and compromise
are strangers in far too many newsgroups these days."
AND
"and do basically every other thing the postings (and common
sense and common courtesy) advise not to"
If Richard Garriot (of Lord British fame) had talked to this guy before releasing UO he could have saved us all a lot of time, effort, and fustration!!
He saw what is the biggest problem with the net at least five years before anybody else. The net is full of great people it interconnects millions, and is home to some of the biggest rejects, dickwads, and lamos in the history of the world. In the last three years alone, the net has become the focal point for every immature jackass on Earth. People are insulting for no reason, rude becuase they can be, and moronic pretty much all of the time. The worst thing that ever happened to the net was when we let Joe User on to it.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
SOme of us go there for warez AND porn. Neekid HAmsters wearing leather chaps, how can you beat that?!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
When I first got on the internet in 1994, USENET was the place to be. I remember the early rumblings, tho, that segregated web-based message boards would one day overtake USENET and make it a vast wasteland. I didn't think it made any sense to purposely limit your conversations to such small focused sites, and figured it would never work.
I haven't used USENET in years now. It got too painful in the mid- to late-1990s to sort through all the spam and all the trolls and all the people posting pointless one-liners to hear themselves talk.
Granted, you still have many of the latter showing up on web-based message boards, but the spam is definitely much better controlled, and the volume of traffic is easier to handle as both a reader and a moderator.
But, man, Spafford was dead-on and years ahead of his time. I'd love to see a message board system with the kind of intelligence and grace that he used to see on USENET in the earlier days. The only way you're going to get it is on a web-based board or through a mailing list.
Too bad.
Too many cooks, perhaps.
-Augie
"Ten years ago this evening, Usenet legend Gene Spafford posted his farewell to news.announce.newusers, news.misc, and a few other newsgroups... Ummm... Crossposting? Bad, very bad...
Hmm.
Cheers,
Ian
Someone get this man a blanket and the worlds smallest violin.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
And when I walk across my Purdue University campus... I still occasionaly run into this guy... its soooo sweet to randomly run into and chat with a ledgend like this guy.
Is Usenet still useful? Is it worth maintaining? I
I say certainly! I use USENET daily. Believe it or not, there are still some groups where valuable discussion still goes on and where the tide of spam isn't much more than a trickle. Certainly, I'm not sure I participate as much as I used to, but I attribute that more to school than anything else. I'll take USENET over web based message boards any day - it's quicker and you don't have to reload your interface every time you view a new message. All available discussions are on the same server, usually maintained by your ISP, so USENET is often more reliable to get to as well.
USENET archives via Google Groups is a godsend for anyone looking for technical advice - I'd still be figuring out how to install Linux rather than being paid as a Systems Administrator if it wasn't for the learning opportunities in the numerous messages on very specific problems you're likely to run across. (I want to interface my blah blah modem with my toaster, etc)
Binary groups rock as well - they're a great way to uncover rare and obscure music that other enthusiasts might have in their collections.
Overall, I love USENET. It's not perfect, but it offers advantages that other Internet protocols can't match. It's survived this long - it will probably be going strong for years to come.
And his last post would be a dupe. Oh, the beautiful irony.
I think usenet still has usefulness left, particularly for support issues.
Google Groups is a godsend when you are trying to troubleshoot something.
Any time I have a problem I do not know how to solve I go to google groups first.
... for example, many people find it reading and posting to /..
/.'s for Usenet might just make it tolerable again. (Usenet, that is.)
Come to think of it, a moderation system like
The signal to noise ratio of UseNet makes it completely unusable. This is why you're more likely to find good company in smaller forums. Why not sign on to an Internet-connected BBS instead, and have discussions with people who you might actually get to know after a while? Where the users number in the hundreds rather than in the millions -- and there's not only a hope, but a good probability, that any abuse of the medium gets nipped in the bud right away?
That's for your everyday "hang out with good company online" activities, of course. For your very specific needs, mailing lists seem to do the trick.
UseNet is UseLess now. If it is to be saved, ever, it needs to be broken up into multiple smaller NNTP networks. Each could have its own culture, policies, unique content, etc. Eventually, some sort of meta-index would appear, to direct users to the content and culture they want to find.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Yes, there is a lot of garbage out there, but for some of us, its indispensable. As for those help docs he speaks of, they are often out of date or not well written. Having people out there in "real time" who have had the same problem as you is often the only souce of guidance available.
I still find Usenet extremely useful, but if you want to avoid being overwhelmed by the garbage you have to take advantage of the filtering features provided by your newsreader. Marking threads as "ignored," creating a "bozo file," etc.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Bwa-haaa! Plus 5, FUNNY. (Laugh.)
I stopped using Usenet for many of the same reasons listed, but a while back I gradually started reading and posting again.
Of course if depends on the newsgroup, but I think it's better now than it was a few years ago. In my opinion, the spammers and newbies have moved on. Just ask any newbie about Usenet and all you'll get is a blank stare...
" What I see happening most of the times, is that advanced users have a kind of "private social club", then a lot of newbies arrives, asking questions that don't really interest the more advanced users. It usually ends up with arguing about it, then a FAQ is made, no one reads it, then the more advanced users leave... And after a while the group isn't useful for anything else than simple answers anymore, because the persons with the skill to answer them are gone."
Welcome to the death of Linux.
I'll start by saying that I've been using Usenet since before the great hierarchy revision (back when it was net.news).
;)
And I remember the day of the infamous Green Card Lottery usenet spam. This was after Spaf bailed, I believe, but it sure was a rude awakening for me. Had I only known what horrors it predicted for my inbox, I would have quit computers and become a subsistence farmer right then and there
But even with the depths it's all sunk to, Usenet (especially via the Deja News / Google Groups interface) is an invaluable tool.
I type in obscure error messages from rare programs, and find that someone else has already solved my problem. When doing development, and seeing strange situations, 80% of the time, Usenet archives will hold an answer, or enough of a clue that I can make the breakthrough.
Yeah, it's got problems. Spammers have polluted some groups to the point of uselessness (I can remember when alt.sex was a discussion group, populated by men and women who were not trying to make money, but were actually talking about sexual matters and their lives). But don't write off usenet yet!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I'm sick of you all. I'm leaving. Inconsiderate bastards. All of you.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
...can't cure humanity.
If you thought usenet or any other technology was going to change us, you we're wrong. We worry about trans-human or post-human, when it's just human arrogance that make is believe that any scientific force will unshackle us from our meat puppets. Ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Dear idiot,
Please read the article. He left in 1993.
Don't worry, I've got karma to burn.
Love,
RTFA-whore
Spaf doesn't play well with others.
Usenet is alive and very useful.
In particular, Usenet offers a set of very mature readers which provide way more functionality than a web browser can give, even for a forum like this..
Don't like someone's attitude-filled posts? Mod them down, all the time. Kill file them even; never see their comments again.
Getting trolled all the time? Set up regexps which kill gnucontrol threads, or any thread started by someone in your troll list.
Distracted by big sigs? Snip them off. Almost all readers will manage this (I just colourise them differently, but auto-trim
when replying.)
Even the older newsreaders, heck, especially the older readers, offer colour highlighting and mark up, making
it easy to skim a thread, noting new comments.
Usenet is actually becoming a nicer place now; the Spam has died away, attracted by the bright lights of the web and mass email. Many newbies don't know what Usenet is and can't flood the place, even in these days of mass broadband. However, the trick is finding an ACTIVE group. Some groups do have a clique sitting in them, but on any decently on-topic group there remains plenty of activity.
Lastly, Google groups. What a goldmine of trivia. And how awful to see your own past posts...
(Amusingly, I still read Usenet with the venerable Unix command line app, 'tin'. It's not perfect, but it's fast and easy to use. It just looks so archaic when running on OS X, on a TiBook...)
I used to be heavily involved with the alt.games.doom(.*) and rec.games.computer.doom.* newsgroups and I undertsand what he was talking about. I speant a tremendous amount of time kicking newbie-bashers in the teeth. Newbies are a fact of life and the only thing I've found that really works is to politely stear them to the information they need, including the resources already available.
I bailed out when I found myself spending more time yelling at people for being assholes than I was spending either getting information I wanted or helping people with questions/problems.
The arival of SPAM didn't help anything. Yeah, I was there to see Kantner and Seigel's landmark Greencard spam. I also saw, and helped difuse the infamous alt.games.doom VS Clark.Net fiasco: some tool spammed a insulting and vulgar message to every Clark.Net user with alt.games.doom as the sender. Which caused every angry responce to get posted to alt.games.doom.
Anyway, Usenet is almost useless unless you are involved with one of the more esoteric newsgroups out there. Pretty much anything in the alt* region is burried in a sewer of spam.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Why maintain a news server when you can get the same functionality from PHP, CGI, etc.? Sure the fact it's more organized on a news server is great but forums, blogs, and /. have proven that usenet is going to be slowly erroding away to nothing in the future. It could save a tremendous amount of money by consolidating systems (slightly less hardware, about the same bandwidth implications). Plus, it would free up another port number. :-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The best things about Usenet: ... no one company owns it
- its public
- its mostly text only so it can be searched
...only when I can find a small group, with an esoteric topic, of dedicated people. The smallness goes under the radar of the mass marketers and the esoteric nature keeps out most of the trolls and dullards. I will not pollute this friends by revealing them here to the Slashdot effect but if you learn to search the topics of your choice, you too many find a nice little corner of Usenet space that you may enjoy.
But gawd, there is SOOO much noise!
I gave up in late 1994, the signal/noise was just to low.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
I think USENET is probably the best part of the Internet. It's plain text and there's no way USENET will ever change to "pay-per-view" type of sharing information, which I think WWW is sliding towards to.
I see no reason why USENET should be considered "dead", the same way for example Gopher is "dead". I hope, that in the future (Internet2), USENET could still be thought to be one of the "core" services, that the Internet has to offer.
An extremely intersting post which essentially says:
Screw you guys, I'm goin home....
"Freedom of speech has always been the abstract red-headed stepchild of the Constitution"
-Suck
Hey, Ralsky (and others of your ilk):
"People rail about their "rights" without understanding that every right carries responsibilities that need to be observed too, not least of which is to respect others' rights as you would have them respect your own."
Sound familiar?
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might use standard HTML or CSS.
There are always going to be people out there that ask stupid questions, don't follow the rules, flame, or in other ways don't add to the discussion.
The slashdot system of moderation is an evolution that usenet wasn't capable of. It allows users to self police and separate wheat from the chaff.
Of course, no system is perfect. We still have duplicate posts and other problems, but it is much better.
And Taco saith "post all the crap you want, for I shalt mod you down." And it was so.
comp.* in general is spam light, and what spam there is is easy to filter out. you don't see too many valid
HOW DO I MAKE $$$$$ WITH A TERNARY OPERATOR!!!!!!!
posts.
Its all a matter of what you use usenet for, lots of excellent discussions take place in numerous groups. If your in *.warez or *.erotic.* and you whine about spam, well, your just too dumb to bother with ;)
The next generation Usenet system will require you to read the faq before posting to a group, and make you take a test on the faq.
you are so badly behaved
;-P
shame on you
lol
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Participation is voluntary, and in good communities, there are usually longstanding members who will lay down the heavy, large-knuckled hand of tough love and teach offenders to behave properly. Those who decide that this treatment is unfair leave (or cause more trouble, and get ignored), and those who decide to stay usually do so humbled. I love it.
I'm sure the unruliest of the rebels wind up creating their own little communities, but I doubt that they'd last quite as long.
Heck, I just wish there were more situations in real life which could be dealt with by simply laying the fist down on instigators and idiots.
"YOU! Loud newcomer! Be quiet and be nice, or get out. And if you decide to stay, know this: The strawberry-donuts are ALWAYS mine. Oh, and during your first month here, you are not allowed to wear pants unless you have purchased a pant-permission ticket from one of us. Now, off with the pants."
The discussion forums have mostly degenerated into a forum for the a$$holes of the world.
alt.binaries.* is almost entirely being used to distribute copyrighted works.
Most of the big eight (comp.*, humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.*) are still viable for reasoned discussion, with far less intrusion from spam (Single Post Across Many - now known as cross-posting in usenet)
The problem with USENET was the signal-to-noise ratio got worse as the number of users grew.
The first solution was moderation, but this placed too much of a burden on a single volunteer for all but the narrowest topic groups and the most dedicated volunteers.
The brilliant concept that Slashdot introduced (as far as I've been able to determine) was distributed moderation-- a mechanism to distribute this moderation load among more than one person. An approach that was hard to conceive of under NNTP made a lot more sense with a database-backed website.
If you compare the number of postings made to the top 3 most-posted-to newsgroups from the 1995 USENET statistics (which have not, to my knowledge, been updated since), to the size of discussions held on Slashdot, the number of posts per day absorbed by Slashdot had eclipsed anything on 1995 USENET back in 2000 when I last looked into this issue.
I consider "distributed moderation" a huge advance in online community development.
Corrections to my notion of history are welcome.
--LP
Usenet's just a niche community these days, like a website but on some other protocol. The number of people on Usenet compared to the 'net' in general is tiny.
And, not only that but usenet is actualy very usable these days, since spammers don't hardly bother with it anymore.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
> He just now realized this? Why didn't he leave USENET 5 years ago?
Uh, if you'd actually read the post, you'd see that it was made 10 years ago. He was describing the evolution of Usenet content from the early 1980s to the early 1990s.
HTH.
So with all those pluses? How come we can't access Slashdot, via NNTP?
It used to be that only the intelligent could make it to Usenet, as getting to Usenet was non-trivial, and Usenet was a good place. Then came AOL and the advent of the dial-up ISP self-installers with Usenet support, and any idiot could get on usenet, and usenet started to go downhill.
Fortunately, the advent of easily installed web forum software, coupled with "proprietary" per-ISP discussion areas, has created discussion "honeypots" that suck in the less intelligent users before they manage to get to Usenet. ISP's don't advertise Usenet access much anymore, and a news reader no longer appears to be a staple of ISP-distributed software. Those big-national ISP's don't want you on Usenet anyway - they want you involved in their own discussion areas that you'd lose access to if you switched providers.
I've noticed that traffic is down, but signal/noise is up. Usenet spam etc. seems to be down as well, although I can't say for sure if it's because spammers have moved on to email or because the cancelbots are just better.
So Usenet is getting back to what made it cool in the first place: Having a "higher" barrier to entry to keep out the riff-raff.
paintball
Let me get this straight: He crossposted a complaint that people are crossposting?? Look at the plank, brother!
Excellent point!
"Usenet" is this big thing with the things and the other stuff,
plus nerds. "The" is an indefinite article used before singular
or plural nouns.
2000/05/26
Message-ID: MPG.1398be529059d09d989767@news.lineone.net
I love USENET. When I first started using it in '92, sci.* ~was~ the internet to me. The discussion level then was about the same as /. is now - the only difference is that ./ provides a nice little ratings system to separate the wheat from the chaff. After a little while online, I learned how to quickly distinguish a flamewar from a serious discussion, and learned to avoid reading the 50 page posts from Archimedes Plutonium. I found it useful, and still occasionally do (about once a month). Many of the people who used to be on USENET moved on to places like /. The question would be why? Saying that USENET has problems is like saying the Internet has problems: spam, junk, hard to find the signal amongst the noise... Nobody is suggesting dumping TCP/IP, why dump USENET? The problem isn't the tool that exists, but how people use it. May I suggest a solution: someone should write an application (open source, of course ;) which brings to USENET many of the same features which lure people to its competition: rateability, lack of address spamming, etc. The basic model was good, is good, and can be better than NEthing else out there once again!
In case you are wondering why I don't write such a thing myself, well, I don't code. I'm just a lowly nuclear physicist. I just wanted to make a useless suggestion, in the original spirit of USENET.
Create a centralized group, where people can rate things.
;)
;)
There would have to be SOME centralization, but there is centralization for everything. Even DNS.
Here's a quick proposal I wrote up in 1999. I've had to edit it to allow Slashdot to post it.
My Usenet - Working title
news.myusenet.com - anwsers requests for headers/bodies in a newsgroup.
attached to the end of the header is a terminator,
which signals end of the original header, then gives the then gives the current rating of the message. example:
Subject: Read me
From: cdavis@thepentagon.com
Orginazation: little
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.current
Rating: 3
This is the text of my message
Users must log in to server, which then only sends the headers which comply to their preferences.
ratings - Users would be able to post to a imagniary newsgroup named misc.ratings. the news server program would accept a post to the
group, not the client, as usual. The message is read, and acted upon. The message contains either in the subject or the body the string "message idnum group rating +1" or the string "message: idnum rating group -1". If the string appears twice, the first case will be used.
example:
Subject: (no subject given)
From: cdavis@thepentagon.com
Organization: little
Newsgroup: misc.ratings
message <MESSAGE ID DELETED BY LAMENESS FILTER> rec.arts.startrek.current in rating +1
The news server will then apply this rating to the message and modify the header, as explained above.
Users will be allowed to rate one message per 50 messages in group per day.
www.myusenet.com On the website, users must create their accounts for use of of the system. These Username/password accounts are both to verify identity, and so establish preferances for message download. Examples of preferences may be:
Download only messages with a rating of at least
: download all messages(*) 0() 1() 2() 3() 4+()
Download replies with a rating of
: download all replies(*) 1() 2() 3() 4+()
Number of generations of replies: __10__
Limit: Only this many messages/day/group.
(*) no limit
() Limited to __500__
Chosen by time (*)
Chosen by rating ()
x-no-repub=yes
By default, My usenet will honor X-no-archive=yes,
and not republish these articles. If a user wants a message
to be carried over on to this system, but archived on a
system such as Dejanews they may add:
x-no-repub=no
to thier message.
If a user wishes Dejanews to archive their messages, but NOT
my usenet, they can affix the header
x-no-repub=yes
to their message.
This system is not terribly confusing. We will assume by default that the people who do not want thier messages archived will also not want them carried over. This can be overruled by using x-no-repub.
misc
In order to incourage growth of the system, the system will be public domain, with the reference implementation licensed under the BSD.
This will incourage porting and adoption.
Servers wishing to mirror the rated pages can connect to a secondary news server, use a username/ password issued via the web page.
Servers wishing to allow ratings to be posted to them may log in to the secondary news server, and submit a batch of headers. A minimun time length between batched must be specif
Colin Davis
Yes, he is right, but he is a cry baby. Thats like some of us saying we aren't going to drive cars anymore because the roads of people that turn without signaling, speed, tail-gate and cut us off. Yes..those things happen..but you don't drive any more? What a baby.... I wouldn't be surprised if he gets mad if someone cuts his sandwhich in 1/2 from cornber to corner versus right down the middle.
http://loudcity.net - Keeping Internet Radio Legal, Afford
Free Software / Open Source Software Usenet Upgrade = irc.freenode.net
Usenet used to be social, where people would chat about various stuff, discuss life, keep in touch, etc. It then turned out to be too public a forum for that, and there got to be too much spam and junk.
There are still a number of active and useful newsgroups, though; they're just focused on relatively narrow and relatively obscure (to the point that a moderate number of people are interested in the topic and contribute). Interactive Fiction and roguelike games are both developed and discussed in such newsgroups. There are also moderated groups which are still worthwhile.
It is true that there aren't new good newgroups. NNTP is a lousy protocol for today's internet, and can be replaced with mailing lists with approximately the same functionality. However, newsgroups which started when NNTP was a good idea still exist, and sometimes have new newsgroup offshoots.
Of course, there isn't really a direct replacement for NNTP; I suppose the closest thing is IMAP, if you had a public read-only mailbox which could receive messages as if it were a mailing list.
I'm surprised I haven't read any comments about how we should create a better protocol than the current one. When email gets flooded with so much spam it becomes unusable, you want a successor protocol, but you don't want the same thing for Usenet?
AFAIK, Usenet lists are mostly unmoderated, and the ones that are have moderators verify every post before making it public. Perhaps we should include ways of moderation that are more like the web-based forums everywhere (EZboard, YaBB, Ikonboard, etc.). Or perhaps something more like Slashdot.
We have to at least attempt a technical solution; after all, we're geeks.
This is a problem with all web discussions, too. There are people with vast, relevant experience--or at least people with reasoned views--and then you have idealistic college students (or these days, junior high school students) arguing with them. Of course no one ever listens to anything, so the arguments are completely pointless, but the ironic part is that once the younger posters grow up a bit, they often discover that, yes, they were wrong.
More and more I'm realizing that all discussion forums, except privately run invitation-only mailing lists, are an utter waste of time. They're great when you're a newbie in a field and don't know a whole lot, but after a while it becomes obvious that the people with the real knowledge stay away. You don't see Kay, Knuth, Kernigan, Carmack, or even Torvalds obsessively reading and posting on Slashdot forums.
(Yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of posting this to Slashdot.)
I've said in the past that I think an important use of usenet going forward will be open source patch distribution. A patch can be submitted via 56k modem to an NNTP server and it would be worldwide within hours. I've always felt that NNTP reader support should be built into rpm or apt-get, or just use something like Glitter.
Intelligent Life on Earth
That is, as good as its users. I still find Usenet useful, but most typically I search subject titles for keywords. I use it for information-finding, kind of like the web, not for discussions really.
The problem with making a moderation system, is that you need a trusted root - in case of slashdot, the site and the editors. If you accept moderations coming from basicly everywhere, nothing is stopping people from creating a news "server" moderating everything to hell and back. In other words, stopping the trolls requires some kind of central control or web of trust that newsgroups never had, and implementing that would change it so fundamentally, one should rather leave newsgroups alone and start fresh.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I live in Arizona where it's a 17 years/image (as far as I've year) felony to have child pornography on your machine. This is the harshest sentance in the U.S. btw.
USNet crossposting spammers mean that even touching the porn groups risks hardcore time for anybody in Arizona. It is often the case that the subject header does not accurately describe the contents, so browsing becomes quite risky. People who run bulk binary downloaders are just asking for life imprisonment. I've always wondered about how the law is dealing/will deal with USENET because of this problem.
Usenet, warts and all, will be useful far into the future, because its store-propagate-forward protocol will continue to work in the face of long delays between nodes. Hell, in early Usenet days some links were done with courier-carried magtapes.
Usenet will be useable between planets in this solar system - a web forum based on Earth wouldn't be useable by anyone past the Moon. And if we finally get out of the solar system, the Net of a Million Lies can go out with us.
Returning to Earth, Usenet still scales better than web forums. I wonder how many web forums have started up, been swamped by lots of users, and had to close for lack of bandwith money, or gone so commercial to pay for server resources that they alienated their community. Neither of these are a problem when creating a Usenet group.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
If web discussions suck so much, why are you reading Slashdot, hm? Shouldn't you have set up a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway by now?
If you don't like netnews, why not start your own? It's gotta be much easier now than it was back in the days of trying to locate people in other states to hook you in to netnews, and there's nothing at all that says that any given news server has to hook in to any other given news server. You could start fresh...
Perhaps the internet encourages us to take a global focus when we should be concentrating on building smaller trusted and authenticated communities. Maybe we don't really need to talk to everyone.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've seen quite a number of Carmack postings...
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
(Cartoo ny Goodness)[userfriendly.org]
(Cartoo ny Goodness)[userfriendly.org]
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It became so bad that it became useless. You could barely get a response from across the street, let alone the next county like you once could. People got fed up, left, newer technologies like cell phones replaced the need to use CB like a phone, etc, etc...
Now it's back to a more civil sane level, full of mainly truckers keeping themselves company during that long haul.
See ya on the flip side good buddy, keep the rubber side down.
So, I actually think usenet is getting better. Newbies don't bother with it. Just ask your average net user about it, they don't have a clue. Others who use usenet just use it for binaries. The text groups are actually becoming almost useful again!
So keep your mouth shut. Let usenet groups become the hangout for hardcores again. The idiots can hang out on their various noisy useless user-friendly web discussion boards -- like slashdot for example. :)
To lazy to login with my real name but I think that posting articles like this essentialy means that sdot is running out of ideas and talent. We should simply forget the accuring db and move on from the insane mods in here. testing...testing...
The largest UK newsgroup; One of the largest in the world.
Almost no spam. Why? Because spammers get flamed mercilessly, their accounts get cancelled and the advertisers accounts also get cancelled. Plus the cancelbots of course.
No top posting. Why? Because newbies and OE morons get flamed mercilessly for doing it.
The FAQ does get read. Why? Because for a start, it's useful and newbies and morons get flamed mercilessly for not reading and absorbing it.
Crossposting is limited. Why? Because crossposters get flamed mercilessly for doing it.
It's the usenet equivalent of New York's zero tolerance campaign.
In short, usenet has degenerated to crap because people don't stand up for the use of their groups. Basically, don't be so fucking polite. If you don't like it, feel free to fuck off and die.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
STFU FartsCox, you were born a troll, and a troll you'll stay! We'll make sure to keep dragging you down into the muck with us!
catfood writes (quoting Spafford):
"Regularly, there are postings of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they aren't being read."
This is because when you're a newbie, it is sometimes impossible to (a) not know what the right question to ask in the first place and (b) realize that people have anticipated your question and if they have, where to find it. Further, people are generally not interested in weeding through a few dozen pages of text in order to find out their question is not covered in any of it. Much easier to simply ask. He's railing against human nature on that one.
But I understand, appreciate and agree with everything else.
catfood then adds:
"Is Usenet still useful? Is it worth maintaining?"
Are you kidding? Have you been to alt.binaries.cd.image any time lately?
Oh! You mean for actual coversation. Well then... The answer to that is "hell no." I stopped around 1997 when I returned after a 18-month hiatus only to find the exact same people arguing. Worse, it was about the exact same thread.
I went to talk.religion.buddhism the other day for Christ' sake and read a few threads of people being complete assholes. I said to myself, "if this is the current state of the Buddhist group..."
My
Limekiller
maybe if phenomenon of people not reading the newuser articles should be taken as an indication that that of newuser articles is faulty. it always seemed to me that it that situation people really get off on yelling at the rookies and showing how smart they are because they know more etiquettte.
"People don't seem ... Regularly, there are postings of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they aren't being read."
to think before posting
All my favorite porn groups went sour a few years ago when the spammers flodded all the best posters off the net.
I now get all my porn through Kazaa lite.
P2P is the new usenet.
In Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel (funny, we had a Jared Diamond article just yesterday)...
He talks about how growth of a community leads to a change in how the community has to be managed. At a certain point, you need a centralized government to manage the interactions between people, because you no longer have a community.
USENET actually allowed a much larger community than had ever been possible before, before things broke down and the need for some kind of governance emerged. On the other hand, you can't kill someone over USENET. It's not real life.
What happened to USENET was inevitable. It is not a critique of human nature to say so; this is what happens when societies reach a certain size when there is no governing force to maintain order.
Despite all the spam and trash on usenet, there's still a lot of good questions that get answered there.
If I've got a questions about weird new hardware that I'm thinking of buying or have already bought and am trying to get work under Linux, then I frequently go over to Google Groups (fka Deja Gnus) to see if someone else in the world has worried about the issue before. Often they have.
But I do worry about who and where are the sites willing to archive usenet, because that archive is genuinely useful, despite the high volume of trash that gets in it.
Another thing, of course, is that giving out your real email address on usenet invites spam, so I lose some touch with individual responses to questions because I don't always check my throwaway free email account for responses to questions I pose on Usenet under a pseudonym.
Ironically, the one-on-one responders with answers are probably using their real email addresses, but don't want to post them to usenet to minimize their spambot exposure.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Forget I said it. I was wrong. I am a slug in the shadow of your greatness.
that's pretty clever. you have to be the first that has ever said that. brilliant!
Kill all posts containing "@aol.com"
'People don't seem to think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly violate copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature files, and do basically every other thing the postings (and common sense and common courtesy) advise not to. Regularly, there are postings of questions that can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they aren't being read.'
Hmmm.... Doesn't this timeframe correspond with the introduction of Windows? And Windows newsgroup clients?
The pieces are all coming together now...
-cmh
This kinda goes along with recent User Friendly cartoons. It's a shame really, usenet was great, but I haven't really used it in years. I say, get rid of it.
-- DuckWing
Yeah, Kazaa is good if you are looking for something specific, but the content gets stale fast. There doesn't seem to be much new stuff added.
Usenet is where you go for your daily dose. Combine a nice binary harvester with broadband and it's like drinking from a firehose!
(yes, your homophobic humor is quite amusing)
It would be intersting to see a chart that compares usenet traffic alongside the number of porn sites on the web Sadly, I would guess there was probably a fairly large exodus from usenet once relatively free (ad supported) porn sites started becoming commonplace
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
People can be morons. Our shared dystopia is riddled with moments of surprise when we see people doing stupid things en-mass.
Where we diverge is the solution.
You see the noise, the stupidity, as a problem that can be diverted and ignored with technology.This would allow the stupid to be channeled to places where they cannot be seen by those who can see well enough to be disgusted.
I've contemplated the same. Pattterns of the stupid filtered and discarded. What remains would be a plain of clarity wher the enlightened could communicate without obstruction. Seems good at first glance.
I see intelligent people distracted to the point of stupidity. Television, fiction, sports, distorted news. GIGO. Stupid people.
You say tp ignore the stupid people. I say, don't make people stupid.
All you people who actually post instead of lurk probably have a tough time understanding these concerns. All this moaning about how the low level of discourse ruins the Usenet is "shy of the mark", so to speak. I need all that to feel comfortable saying something that might turn out to be dumb, thoughtless, or rude. I sure don't need etiquette police flaming EVERYONE with "RTFM", "think before you post", and "don't be rude" complaints disguised as advice. Not everyone posts badness, and those who do, don't do it all the time. Spam is the real enemy, not individual slips in socializing. Everyone should be encouraged to post as many messages (that's messageS, not a single message crossposted over half the groups, 100 times per day-- that would be spam) as they want. How else are we to improve if we don't practice?
So this Spaf character gets all melodramatic about a "final" post, barfs out a blanket indictment of all Usenet users and the Usenet itself, and then quits, presumably in disgust? FLAME ON! Bite me, Spaf, you rude dog, you quitter. If any sentiment deserves flaming it's that one. Call us all a bunch of jerks and criminals, will you? You sing for the RIAA? huh? HUH? May you rot in your ivory tower. (ok, flame off.) Usenet is a great medium. It's fast, and that implies sacrificing a little politeness and accuracy.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Error: host not found
c:\>_
Yes, I know top posting is a sin and I've searched and read numerous sites where the reasons it's a sin is dicussed. Yet I remain a top poster because it makes more sense. If you're following a thread it is easier to keep up with all the responses on the top. If you're looking at a message standing alone then sure, posting to the bottom would be the way to go, but who reads like that?
Interestingly enough, looking at my posts from 1993 (via Google) I was a bottom poster back in the day. Don't know when I switched...
If Usenet weren't relevant and useful few would make so much effort to reproduce it in other forms, such as e-mail lists or Slashdot.
Are there flaws in NNTP? I think it could be improved with some form of authentication to help guarantee that the source address of a post can't be forged.
However, the beauty of Usenet is that anyone can post there. Yes, that's also the flaw.
The problem is that we're all seeking quality answers and interesting discussions, but nobody can agree on just what we need to do to achieve that result. Even if there were no off-topic posts and everyone behaved like ladies and gentlemen, there would inevitably be people who want to read more basic information and people who want to read more advanced techniques.
Not having to rely on people to set the agenda is what makes Usenet so engaging to me. It's fast, it's a big free-for-all, and yes, there's lots of nonsense and wrong information. The best solution is to do what most people are simply too lazy to bother with: build a healthy kill-file and a substantial watch list. One person's troll is another person's jester.
I have grown used to rude behavior on the Internet. Anonymity can lead to this sort of thing. However, the same anonymity is what enables many to speak what's on their mind. While this can result in a very low signal to noise ratio, it also results in very candid experiences and ideas.
It's worth the effort to find those ideas and ferret them out of the background noise. Nobody can do that for you. That's what is so great about Usenet.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
...they are always slow, and chock fulla spam. I gave them up, much as I used to like them.
I like your common sense approach to posting though, even having search terms~keywords being mandatory would help, but it ain't happening.
I think web forums are more useful now for tech stuff, they are faster to access, and if the correct software is used you can see the whole thread as it evolves, and customise it to your liking, and it's just as searchable. And half of newgroups news is the endlessly repeating news addy headers and sigs and repeats of the previous postings. 50 k of re: re re: re re re: re re re re: to get 2 more k of "news" on the thread.
no.
stop crossposting usenet posts to slashdot, you facist!
As proof I submit:
news:alt.binaries.subgenius
---
Copyright © 2002 me
There are hundreds of good newsreaders that do all this and more. For example, MT-Newswatcher for the Mac offers regexp-based scorefiles: don't want to see AP? Don't. Don't want to see any response or any comment that even mentions AP? Gone. Want to score up (and color code) responses to your posts? Trivial. Build a whitelist of known intelligent posters and the spam just vanishes. Add to that lightning fast response (the server's usually local and pulls the entire group at once), intelligent tree-views of postings and a horde of other features I miss everytime I suffer with a web-based board like /. (No news feed for me anymore: Google groups is it, and without all the features of a good newsreader it's hard to enjoy USENET.)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Those web forums usually aren't archived by Google (or anyone else), so they have no sense of permanence. Newbies ask the same questions over and over, not because they're clueless newbies, but because any knowledge posted on web forums is effectively lost to posterity.
I really hate to see Usenet replaced by a million different proprietary variations of UBB. Usenet, along with its centralized Deja/Google archive, was a good idea, and we should've stuck with it and made it work.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
... and to fight, as the old saying goes. My observation, as a former alt.flamer, Meower and veteran of the alt.life.sucks/Skippy/HipCrime wars is that for every clueless newbie, there is a self-righteous experienced idiot who will burn a newsgroup down to the ground around him in flames rather than just use a killfile, sit on his hands and ignore the wretches. And before you blame troll sources such as Meow or "Aol'ers" or "Altopia posters" or "Web TV'ers", note that most of the flame wars I've read in various newsgroups are not newbies or trolls vs newsgroup regulars, it's interior faction X vs interior faction Y.
The mechanics of how these things work is interesting -
1. Poster A has been posting in alt.* for a good long time.
2. Poster B posts a flame, a troll, or just an unpopular opinion that Poster A objects to, in flaming language.
3. Escalation.
4. Poster A becomes a net.lawyer and net.cop and attempts to first, convince Poster B that he is "off-topic", abusive, or not part of the "community" and attempts to cut off B's net.access by complaint letters to B's ISP.
5. a)This often fails, in which case B finds out about it and the entire controversy continues to fester, with charges and countercharges of censorship and "law" breaking. b) It succeeds and B either learns a lesson - or gets a more secure account from netcopping and proceeds to start a personal vendetta against A.
The results are predictable - useful discussion decreases and noise increases.
Web boards, strangely enough, don't have this problem as much - seeing as it's one or a few people responsible for admitting people into the site, rules and enforcement tend to be more clear cut and not as controversial and varied - Slashdot, for example, isn't dependent on whether ISP X has a looser TOS than ISP Y. Furthermore, it's up to the administrators, not any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants to send a complaint E-mail to the offender's ISP. No one, even if they've been at a web board for X years is under the illusion that it's "their" webboard and they have the right to "enforce" their personal interpretation of rules.
In short, it's not just trolls and newbies that have impacted Usenet negatively - it's also the self-righteous and the intolerant.
WAHT IS USNET. ASLO U GOT NE W4R3Z???
On April 29th, 2003 at 01:01 PM MDT catfood wrote:
> Ten years ago this evening, Usenet legend Gene Spafford
> posted his farewell to news.announce.newusers, news.misc, and a few
> other newsgroups. Among other things, spaf wrote: 'People don't seem to
> think before posting, they are purposely rude, they blatantly violate
> copyrights, they crosspost everywhere, use 20 line signature files, and
> do basically every other thing the postings (and common sense and common
> courtesy) advise not to. Regularly, there are postings of questions that
> can be answered by the newusers articles, clearly indicating that they
> aren't being read.' Speaking of his own post, spaf said, 'even if it is
> perceived as self-indulgent garbage, it will fit right in with the rest
> of the net.' Ten years later, we still have all of spaf's complaints
> plus mounting spammage just barely held in check by auto-canceling
> volunteers. Is Usenet still useful? Is it worth maintaining? I say yes,
> but I can feel spaf's pain. It may be too late now, but hey spaf: thanks.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I've seen some newsgroups that died that still recieve spam every day, even though nobody has posted or looked at it in 1-2 years. You'd think spammers would know when nobody wants Viagra because the group's been abandoned. Maybe groups that died except for spam should be shut down?
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
So...some guy, that doesn't sound familiar, stopped posting to Usenet 10 years ago...
That's about as exciting as that Knuth guy declaring he doesn't have an e-mail/email addy anymore.
It's a slashdot story that's basically an episode of Seinfeld...all about nothing. Guess I'll go empty a few bit buckets.
Usenet will always be around because no one company owns it. In my opinion, web forums and Usenet co-exist just fine. Web forums can have specialized features (like in ./) while newsgroups provide the speed and accessibility. I would read the WarCraft forums for tips, but when I have a Java question, comp.lang.java is the way to go.
You young kids don't know that net.gods, as they used to be called, routinely dropped from Usenet to great concern of those involved. Yet usenet marched on.
This gave rise to the old joke: "imminent death of Usenet predicted, film at eleven".
Yes, usenet has deteriorated steadily since it's creation. No it is not dead. Traffic and users are still increasing, hard as it might be to believe. I call this the Groucho Marx effect, people confuse the drop in quality with a drop in popularity i.e. "nobody eats there anymore, its too crowded".
There are many reasons why usenet was/is sick. None of them were addressed by Spaf. Users are making the best of a really flawed medium (and by this I don't mean text, but the oddities of the group hierarchy, the difficulty of moderation, the lack of collective memory, and so on).
I find comp.lang.tcl to be a great group to participate in. I can talk to the tcl maintainers there, get advice, discuss interesting aspects of tcl, and, since I get so much out of it, I give back where I can.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
A true rarity.
+1 funny.
How is the RIAA/MPAA going to shutdown Usenet? By the time they get around to demanding the removal of a file from everyone of thousands of news server, the articles have probably already expired on their own.
There's no single server they can go after. No single company. Posters are largely anonymous.
USENET, the Internet, all have been comercialized and abused over the years. People see a means the make money, save money, exploit, get off, etc. they will take it. It's too bad too.
Take Gopher though, it is an all but forgotten technology, but it is still around. There are still a few good gopher sites out there, and for the most part it isn't corrupted like the rest (mostly because it never became really popular).
So there you go. You want a nice clean place to go online, check out gopher. It's like the small town forgotten in time to the big city of the Internet. Surfing it is like a breath of fresh air.
"Your 'Gin n'tonic Futon Brain' sure makes you smart!"
"That's 'Positronic-photon Brain', you idiot!"
An older but fully mature technology that does not allow a lot of the crap that usenet does.
Prior to being allowed to post, you must subscribe.
Your telephone number and or other documentation are required as per the sysops discretion.
There is a fee in some cases depending on how wealthy and eccentric the sysop is.
I'm not sure if fidonet does PGP authentication of a valid server but RIME did so.
Most groups are moderated, the unmoderated groups tend to get shut off a lot due to funding issues.
A spammer, virus uploader, etal can be quickly tracked down in most cases.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Why is when folks try to induce others to do things a certain way, no matter how often they are reminded that their system is not natural for people to use (at least in the fashion they envision), they cling to the notion that the problem is with the people using it and not the system itself?
This is the nature of people. If you want something better than this, you're free to search it out, but standing around stamping your feet insisting that everyone behave is pointless.
What is it people expect from Usenet? Write it down on paper and make a list of "properties" that you folks (whomever that would be) would like to get out of Usenet -- then imagine you're holding a pool that represents the entire population of the world and say to yourself "how do I get just these certain types of people to post on Usenet and no one else?"
For starters, the answer is simply to close off Usenet to the public. If you want a certain set of behaviors, you need to be able to enforce your rules (which are, in the context of human nature, unnatural and arbitrary). Perhaps create tiers, in which only those who have graduated from the lower tiers may participate in the upper tiers. The public at large (including all the porn and get-rich-quick schemes) can post at the bottom, and as people prove themselves, move them up through the tiers. Use certified PGP signatures to enforce posting rights.
You have a wide-open system. You have people acting like humans act, and will always act. If you want something different than what you get with Usenet, go build it.
its the spam that comes from it that has people complaining. See recently slashdotted article: click here
Personally I think I prefer kuro5hin's comment moderation system. Slashdot does it with a serial system where a minority of selected users' votes are added together. K5 lets everyone vote in parallel and averages them. I think some people rate a lot, but most people rate to correct when they think something's been rated unfairly.
On the other hand k5 doesn't get nearly as much trolling, so I don't normally order the comments based on the ratings, anyway.
In today's e-mail communication, dragging entire messages, sometimes four and five levels deep, along with your e-mail seems to be the norm. It's probably because all of the common mailreaders today insert a copy of the replied-to message before you even start typing. Most people probably believe it has to be that way, and that you may not even be allowed to delete the cited text.
It may not be a waste of bandwidth today, but it is a waste of storage space, besides being a pain to wade through for the reader.
Is it worth reminding people to cite only relevant context, e.g. on a mailing list? Or am I missing something -- is there perhaps, somewhere, a good argument for citing entire messages, and carrying them around in your e-mails? Or is it time to write mailreaders that simply don't do this by default?
Hello, logic pedant. You knew what he meant but just couldn't resist being a smartass. You are part of the problem. Thanks for standing up and illustrating.
Maybe if you like porn (though even the porn is drowned out by the spam!) or trading insults or arguing at length about nothing or writing long diatribes nobody reads -- then yeah, I guess Usenet has value. But those of us with a life have long since moved on.
Besides which, the basic concept is out of date. In 1982, connecting to a non-local computer was expensive and/or complicated for most people. So it made since to organize an ad-hoc modem network for online conversations. Now, most people can connect to a server on the other side of the planet more easily than they can connect to a local BBS. The place for online conversations is web servers. Not because web pages are prettier than Usenet posts. But because web applications can help you manage all that noise. That's why Slashdot has so many users. It's certainly not because of good user interface design!
Even though I hate government agencies, here's what I propose: Newbies must get an Internet License to be able to log on. You don't let people drive on the road without a license, why should they be allowed to roam free online without one? This would include passing some sort of Netiquette test and of course a road course with an bitter old net user who lost his .COM job who hates your guts.
Will it happen? Probably not. But oh man would that be nice.
C'mon, people, it is these kind of complaints that your killfiles are for.
This sig no verb.
We published an interview with Spaf a little while ago and his insights still are well-worth reading and heeding. He is still very concerned about the newest users on the Internet, etiquette, ethics, and the impact of networked communication on society. You can read the interview here.
This is just another problem that can and should be solved by accountability. As long as people can be anonymous online, then they will behave badly because they will know they cannot be held accountable for their actions.
If you want to fix Usenet, then simply change one important aspect of the design: no anonymity. Then watch as the piracy, trolling, and other shit disappears.
And don't flame with the usual crap about anonymity being necessary to protect freedom of speech or freedom of opinion. Any decent country already guarantees those freedoms through existing laws, so you don't need to hide behind anonymity to exercise them. And any country that lacks such protections needs to be concerning itself with more important things than the signal-to-noise ratios in newsgroups...
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Booo hooo!
Oh well...
~Ding dong! Spaf is gone!~
Usenet/newsgroups, whatever you want to call them, is better off without such ilk as Spaf. He has as much talent as Keeanu Reeves, and as much personality as a comatose whore. He didn't matter, and he won't be missed. Seeing him 'go' is like seeing a self-installed icon rip itself off the cathedral wall and crawl into the nearest dumpster where it belongs.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
The best example in the world is the unbelieveably awesome people who hang out in rec.aquaria.* (aquarium related chatter). The community in there is just amazing.
Thanks for the info. I've got a huge load of Viagra that I'm trying to unload, and I've been looking for a cool community that might be interested in hearing more about it, along with some other great products (we sell the BEST penis enlargement kit you can find anywhere).
See you soon!
Even though I havn't used it in quite a while, (self-enforced absence really), maybe technically it is dying, however, I've always liked it over the last few years. It had a few groups that I have really enjoyed.
Alt.atheism, is by far my favorite. A combiniation of a warm enviroment, with wonderful trolls, and a horribly sick sense of humor. That's the main reason I don't read USENET anymore, it takes up too much of my time. Then add on talk.origins for great scientific discussion, the sf2 newsgroups before they died for the best in anal-retentive useless information. The various what-if newsgroups for historical analysis. It's just too much.
I do think that USENET is being phased out, but it will never die. There will always be those dedicated to it to keep it alive.
Find groups that have communities
;-) I havent read rmp in years and I wonder if it's still as much fun.
Seems a few experienced members really hate each other...
That pretty much sums up my usenet experience. Apart from the joys of alt.binaries, the text groups that aren't full of spam are full of cliques running full-scale flame-wars. I once spent a couple months lurking on rec.arts.books.tolkien, and got to a point where I was posting on a semi-regular basis, but I never really shook that sense that I wasn't part of the clique. It takes an awful lot of wasted time and energy to really integrate into groups that have been dominated by the same people who were there when spaf quit.
otoh, one group I always enjoyed was rec.music.phish. There were cliques there, too, but a much phriendlier tone.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
The first solution was moderation, but this placed too much of a burden on a single volunteer
:)
This was solved by the creators of the alt.hackers group. The group was marked as moderated, but there was no moderator, so only people who knew how to hack the system could post.
Anyway, Usenet moderation is done through a single email address per newsgroup. That does not mean a single person by any means. These days, most of the moderation for the larger groups is done by teams, often with the aid of bots. I don't read anywhere near as much netnews as I used to, but groups like comp.lang.{c,c++}.moderated seem to be doing fine.
that had me laughing my ass oof.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I've often googled for technical questions and found them on forums. Google does indicate dynamic pages, it isn't braindead. Whether or not this is a good thing is up for debate i guess.
Photos.
You whiney bitches.
Slashcode is a good one - for the limited purpose for which it's designed. /. discussions start with an article being posted, go for a day or so, and die out.
Compare with USENET or mailing lists, where several different discussions are going on simultaneously, each often lasting for weeks.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
That mean ole USENET does.
Usenet, unfortunately, has no ejection mechanism.
No, but Usenet II does. Of course, I'm not sure if Usenet II is active or not. The web pages are old, but the idea seems sound. Does anyone know the status of Usenet II?
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
I dunno, I think Russ Allbery's rant about malicious and unremitting crapflooding is a lot more salient, not to mention inspirational. True, I have no idea what's up with Usenet2, but it gives me a warm fuzzy to see someone who still takes (or took) that kind of pride in their work.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I grab headers for several groups daily, and have subscriptions to two pay servers (my former ISPs news server was a 386 with a 10GB drive). Actually, its time for a leech session just about now...
Best attributes - its anonymous (RI-/MP-AA still hasn't figured it out), leeching is acceptable, reader software is available (and easily cracked - or so I am told), you can usually find something that interests you, make several IDs for yourself and then invade groups and argue amongst yourselves, troll, laugh at the freaks in the 'recovery' groups...
Worst attributes - damn ISP server logs (there goes being anonymous), sharing is a royal pain (even with good software), spam, waiting for your request to be filled, waiting for something interesting to be posted, spam, having to weed out the child-porn after downloading from an adult-porn group (or so I am told), spam, virus, spam, trojan, spam, registry hack (followed by two days of crash/reg-corruption recovery), spam, backdoor, trolls, did I mention spam?...
Er, come to think of it where did I put that copy of Kazaa Lite...?
People are insulting for no reason, rude becuase they can be, and moronic pretty much all of the time. The worst thing that ever happened to the net was when we let Joe User on to it.
:)
Ironic that a post complaining about how rude people can be then goes on to insult basically 99% of the population, all based on a clever geek buzzword (Joe User - ooo look, he's playing off Joe SixPack or Joe PunchClock, but with a computer twist!).
Even more ironic that a moderation system designed to filter out obvious trolling and flamebait ends up giving this the highest score
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
3y3 ph33r b0w sp4f 4nd h1Z b0wt1e k0llecti10n.
Most of what Usenet was originally designed to do has been replaced by other technology, such as pHpBB and it's ilk, traditional mailinglists, etc. And Usenet has become a nightmare to administrate.
... most companies don't want to touch it, let alone run a non-binary server.
To take a *full feed* you need hundreds of gigs of storage (if you want decent retention on the popular groups) and you need several edge-network servers taking those feeds and de-spamming it before you deposit into your main NNTP servers. You need a couple of employees tweaking the groups, retention, access lists, spam filtering heuristics. Legal issues with copyrighted material
I've never found it very useful except when looking for porn.
Still, there are many newsgroups on there worth saving. Maybe a housecleaning is in order? Get rid of all the groups they don't need. Get rid of the binaries. We really don't need those; it's not as if the warez guys don't have enough open FTP servers out there to exploit. And I can get my pr0n elsewhere.
If you get rid of the pointless groups and keep the stuff that is actually interesting and relevant, people will stay and Usenet will thrive, rather than wither.
Online discussion system. Not because it is perfect, but because it could more or less keep its standards the last 10 years. The reason for this is that it is harder to grasp which keeps the I want to troll posters in the web based forums. Now add the google groups to that and you have a Usenet which is better than it had been ten years ago.
In frustration, some of us set up a private NG using spare capacity at someone's workplace (him being the resident BOFH). No spam, no archiving, say what you like, use your real e-mail address, and all with the normal NNTP interface, unlike a crappy BB or FTP server. Anyone else gone this way? It's sort of like Usenet without either idiots or net nazis (I'm sorry, but it sounds as if Spaf was showing emergent net nazi tendencies).
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I'm still waiting for the Slashdot NNTP access which was promised ... some years ago.
"Web forums" really are shit, always have been, always will be.
moderated groups are fine. Bright example is rec.guns -- high traffic and very good content. Aggressive moderation is the answer to the spam (you need good moderators tho).
Sadly I don't believe that anybody in the world is using this feature. One problem is that ftp is too slow. Another problem is that in the present state of the system each moderator has to have a seperate ftp-server.
See the info-file for more info Info gnus
There are a couple of specialized technical groups that are not interesting for most trolls. That's why the knowledgeable people there have not been driven away yet. These groups are quite good. You typically recognize them like this: people use real names, know how to quote, have correctly separated signatures, use correct spelling and grammar most of the time, almost no meta discussion of the type 'please change your X', almost no flaming. Not that it's all about those technicalities, but they're a good sign that discussion will be at a high level.
Try Bittorrent if you haven't already. It is the solution to that particular problem, and I predict that it will take a lot of people out of Usenet file downloading.