Another Nail In Usenet's Coffin?

Karamchand writes "Today news.individual.net in an email to its more than 250.000 registered users announced that they won't be able to continue offering free Usenet access. While it provided text-only groups many people relied on individual.net's service to take part in one of the Internet's older services. In a time were a working news server is not a selling point for ISPs and most internet users never heard about this service, will this be another nail in the coffin of Usenet?"

Comments

Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

No, for text usenet group access, Google Groups is fine. For binary access, well, you probably have to pay but it is worth it.

Re:Google Groups

[Old Wolf]

Google groups, fine? What planet are you on.

It's beyond me how they can't hire a programmer who knows how to make the text that the poster types, appear without being mangled! (newlines inserted, newlines deleted, lines of the new post interpreted as quoted text from the old...

Also it's annoying to see a reply listed in the tree view as the parent of the post that it's replying to, or a reply listed as a child of a previous reply to the same parent.

Not to mention the un-intuitive user interface which encourages posting without quoting the parent.

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

I just figured most ISPs still have some sort of newsgroup servers set up...with binary stuff. They probably don't carry ALL the newsgroups and sometimes probably not the ones you'd want but they're there.

I just wished there was a netcraft article about Usenet. That would have made things much easier.

Re:Google Groups

[Another MacHack]

It got worse when they went into their new beta. In thread listing mode, I can't find a way to jump to the next ten posts without scrolling through the left-hand pane to find the right one to click on.

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternative to google groups http://www.talkaboutprogramming.com/

Re:Google Groups

[nocomment]

That's not even the worst part, the fact it takes 12 hours for what you say to show up, and by then you have gotten 30 replies. and the thread is dead. It's fine for the 3 times a year I use usenet.

You really think Usenet is dying? Anyone got the link to netcraft?[tt]

Re:Google Groups

[ari_j]

I have to disagree. Google Groups is great for reading anything over a week old, but for keeping up-to-date or having any kind of discussion, it is abysmal at best. What took me less than 24 hours when I had Cox cable internet with Usenet access in Phoenix can take upwards of two weeks using Google Groups.

But it is phenomenal for read-only access to things a week or more old, and by "or more" I mean back to the Pleistocene era.

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

In fine 'me too' fashion, I'd have to say I agree with you. Google has pretty well fusked up their once perfectly-fine usenet interface.

Re:Google Groups

[EnronHaliburton2004]

That's not even the worst part, the fact it takes 12 hours for what you say to show up, and by then you have gotten 30 replies.

That's wierd. Usually when I post via Google Groups, my post is there a few minutes later.

Are you talking about the time that it takes for the article to be propogated to other NNTP servers? That's been a problem with some Usenet server since the beginning :)

Re:Google Groups

[oKtosiTe]

Perhaps you should try refreshing your browser cache?

Re:Google Groups

[SpaceLifeForm]

They could use a Pleistocene sort option so you can find the oldest threads first.

Re:Google Groups

[novakyu]

I just wished there was a netcraft article about Usenet. That would have made things much easier.

What, you want confirmation from Netcraft that Usenet is dead? What else do you want? Do you want it to confirm that Elvis is dead, too?

Re:Google Groups

[bigberk]

Not to mention the un-intuitive user interface which encourages posting without quoting the parent.

I agree with you, Google's groups service (the beta) really isn't impressive at all. There is no quoting of parents, and the threads are difficult to navigate. I still use the old groups system, which was far superior. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I really hope Google reverts to their old interface.

Re:Google Groups

[commodoresloat]

You really think Usenet is dying? Anyone got the link to netcraft?

There's only one way to tell for sure if usenet is truly dying.

Count the number of posts to usenet that mention usenet.

Re:Google Groups

[mollymoo]

That's not even the worst part, the fact it takes 12 hours for what you say to show up, and by then you have gotten 30 replies. and the thread is dead.

Not any more. It updates within minutes now.

Re:Google Groups

[Blinky the Shark]

Yes, it's a great archive. It should've stayed that way -- *an archive*. Posting? That's what real NNTP clients are for.

Re:Google Groups

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I liked the Deja interface. Pre "consumer portal", that is.

Re:Google Groups

[bob beta]

for text usenet group access, Google Groups is fine.

Okay, then. What's the name of their NNTP server. Will I need a logon to post?

Don't feed me their pretty 'web' interface. It's gotten more and more a convoluted mess over the years since DejaNews started.

Re:Google Groups

[smchris]

Agreed. Google is "ask the genie". But usenet is where you have a serious ongoing conversation.

I guess it depends on the ISPs target market and your needs. I would never use an ISP without usenet and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone with a tech interest in particular.

But for the cheapie ISPs? Grandma wants web and mail for $6/month? How is an ISP going to do that and be full service? Doubly smart for cheapie ISPs in poor "red state" markets. Porn? Never! Not on our servers, praise Jesus!

If usenet died, that would be one thing. But I don't have any problem with multi-tier marketing of ISPs.

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

1981 is part of the pleistocene era? no that isn't the oldest post in the google groups archive, just a random 1981 post... which is the first year in the archive as aquired from dejanews. I've also noticed, that a good 1/3 of the 2000+ posts I made to usenet(1995-2000), are 'dead' links in the groups archive... Corruption of the DB?

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

There's only one way to tell for sure if usenet is truly dying.

Wasn't the rule: "You know Usenet is dead when Hitler posts to it" or something like that?

Re:Google Groups

[Tony Hoyle]

There is a perfectly good quoting system but for some bizarre reason they hid it.

Instead of hitting the reply link at the bottom, which opens a blank window, click the link at the top that gives you more options, then hit reply there. It takes you to a nice page with the quoting done properly.

Re:Google Groups

[Tony Hoyle]

I've had lots of conversations over google groups. It works really well - even better than my ISP (that has something like a 10 minute delay on messages).

Of course if you're talking about the old google groups of 6-12 months ago that would have taken a while to have a conversation with.

Re:Google Groups

[MightyMartian]

I haven't seen propagation times that long since I got a small feed through UUCP. Besides, if you want instanteous communication, there's ICQ, IRC, a gazillion other chat programs/protocols, not to mention the telephone.

Re:Google Groups

[Shakrai]

Do you want it to confirm that Elvis is dead, too?

Elvis is not dead, he just went home.

Re:Google Groups

[John Pliskin]

Sneakers is a great movie!

Re:Google Groups

[Magic5Ball]

You might be refering to this:

[Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. ...

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah you've got to wonder what the hell they were thinking. The old Groups had a "Next 10 in thread" link so how the heck did they forget to add one? It's not exactly complicated!

Re:Google Groups

[lintux]

Just in case you didn't know, for as long as it lasts, you can still use the old version of Google Groups through the international domains. groups.google.co.uk, for example. I hope it'll work for a long time, because indeed Google Groups II is far from an improvement. :-(

Re:Google Groups

[Mugros]

Urks, Google Groups. I score Google posters down so i won't read them. Most of it is SPAM and the rest are some kind of dumb users who just want to post once or leave some stupid comment. It is not worth reading it, most of the time.

Re:Google Groups

[drsquare]

Google groups is fucking awful. For example:

1) There's no way to follow threads properly. When you go into a group, it doesn't mark which ones you've already read or not, so you have to go through the entire lot.
2) It doesn't show long posts all at once, you need to click on 'Read the rest of this message' to read it all, which is fucking torture on long threads.
3) You can't change your settings once you've signed up.
4) Frames.
5) Different threads with identical subjects are lumped together.
6) Posts with no-archive set don't appear at all, making a lot of threads completely unreadable.

And that's just with the old version. The new version is a hundred times worse. They haven't fixed the problems with the old one, but they've taken away all the GOOD bits instead. The previously simple, compact thread-list which made browsing the newsgroup pretty easy, is now replaced with a completely bloated list which takes up EIGHT lines per thread, rather than the usual ONE.

You can go to the old version at groups.google.co.uk, but they've crippled it so you can't reply to a post. When you try to reply, it gives an error about not being able to retrieve the post you're replying to. I mean come on, all those fucking genius PHDs and master-programmers, and they can't get something right that Deja was doing right ten years ago? I can't believe that a company that constantly boasts how clever and talented they are, can actually make an interface go BACKWARDS.

The motive is obvious: profit. If they dumb it down, fuck over all the 'old' users, and try to attract the drooling masses with a bloated cartoon interface, they can get more ad-hits. Bollocks to usability or functionality, bollocks to the integrity of one of the Internet's oldest services, nothing is sacred from the latest dot-com raping it for profit.

People are always saying how great the gmail interface is, but I don't see how that can be when google groups is so poor, unless they're concentrating all their resources on gmail, because it's the new 'glamour' service. Although I suppose eventually it will go the same way as google groups: They'll come out with a new and improved 'beta' version, with a crippled awful interface ten times worse than the original, then put some bug in the old one so people can't go back to it.

Re:Google Groups

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Google Groups isn't fine. Besides other issues mentioned here, google will not carry certain groups, probobly because of cease and desist chilling effects. Example alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.video-game .

This and many other cannot be had on google groups.

Re:Google Groups

[shrykk]

" Perhaps you should try refreshing your browser cache?"

No, it's a real problem, albeit one that appears to be getting better now. But several more remain:

In the posts it creates (and sends throughout USENET): It encourages not quoting and attributing properly, it mangles anything around the '@' sign indiscriminately, it defaults to sending out users' e-mail addresses unmunged.
In how it appears: It mangles e-mail addresses (and anything containing the '@' sign), it gets confused about what is quoted text, it is awkward to navigate, and above all, it gives little indication that it is an interface to USENET. The old AOL lamer's comment, "This is not usenet you dum ass, tihs is AOL!!11!" has come again, in the form of people thinking newsgroups are Google groups.

On the other hand, they do respond to customer pressure, for example they have already stopped trimming leading whitespace from posts, and if we keep complaining long enough they might get it right. They are losing a lot of goodwill at the moment though - not from the general public, but from a lot of technical, net-savvy people who had previously been big fans of Google. It's commonly known as Google-broken-beta now.

Re:Google Groups

[Guildencrantz]

And the lack of any actual discussion on alt.politics.socialist.nazi might be usable as support for this theory.

Re:Google Groups

[millette]

Maybe because people abuse quoting and top posting... god I hate that!

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

For some very finite values of "fine" which include failing to quote properly, breaking attributions on occasion, and generally making quite a mess.

Possibly "fine" by the standards of Outlook Express or the old AOL clients, but certainly a great deal worse than even the /old/ google posting interface.

However, folks who are hapopy to post unreadable foo will find it "fine", certainly.

Re:Google Groups

[ncstockguy]

Google Groups is a disaster. I have practically stopped using Usenet since they took it over. It is a mess, very unfriendly to users and appears to me to be a deliberate effort to wipe out Usenet. I expect to see a "pay" information system emerge from this mess by who other than... Google.

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, Google groups is really only ok in a pinch, but it completely sucks as compared to the original DejaNews. In fact, the best thing that I can really say about Google groups is that, well, they saved the text usenet archive.

Of course, real usenet usage is best done through a specific client text or GUI.

Re:Google Groups

[Hognoxious]

Posting? That's what real NNTP clients are for.

Sometimes you're away and need to post from a cybercafe, or work have blocked port 119. So as a last resort, it's better than nothing.

Re:Google Groups

[Gilmoure]

You mean Godswin's Law?

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Codger]

Feh, given the number of morons on the boards these days, a web-based usenet service without filtering capability is worthless.

(If Google has added filters since last time I used it, go ahead and shoot me)

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but you'd have to exhume it first...

Re:Google Groups

[tfb]

The old google groups used to have a fairly high latency before articles (posted from it) appeared. The new one (google groups beta?) is much better. But only in this respect, the interface sucks in all the ways described above.

Re:Google Groups

[jonadab]

> People are always saying how great the gmail interface is, but I don't
> see how that can be

The people who say this are comparing it to Yahoo! mail and Hotmail and their
ilk. And, indeed, compared to those interfaces, Gmail's interface *is* great,
in the sense that it doesn't suck nearly as horribly. Even if you compare it
to some of the worse mailreaders, e.g., Outlook Express and Thunderbird, it
doesn't seem completely horrible. Where it starts seriously suffering is if
you compare it to *featureful* mailreaders (e.g., Gnus) or to *user-friendly*
ones (e.g., Pegasus Mail). It cannot compete on those terms.

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

|| for text usenet group access, Google Groups is fine. ||

Be serious. It's only for checking for ancient messages that aren't on your NNTP server anymore.

Next you'll be saying, "Who needs [choose email client]? There's webmail."

Re:Google Groups

[HTH NE1]

Still, you have to consider the quality of some of the software used to make those postings. Newsreaders which don't generate the References header. Newsreaders which insert the previous article's Message-ID at the start of the References header instead of the end. Newsreaders which reverse the order of the References header. Newsreaders which keep only one back reference and are posted with "X-No-Bananas^H^H^H^H^H^H^HArchive: yes". And virtually no support for an Also-References header when someone pulls in text from articles outside the thread, a behavior that prevents content comparison to reconstruct threads.

And that's with data that is in a format specified by an RFC. Quotation styles aren't bound by a single standard adhered to by everyone, and people regularly mangle them by themselves. (Is there any newsreader that has format-flowed support built-in?)

Really, the best solution to not mangle postings is to not do any processing on the messages at all. And since by web standards they're already too ugly, Google is compelled to polish them anyway.

(Did the usenet-format list ever release their updated RFCs?)

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

Top posting is better than no quoting at all.

Re:Google Groups

[Anonymous Coward]

I never saw the google or deja interfaces as that usefull for following newsgroups. They were both fine for looking up archived posts, but for day to day reading they never provided an easy way to see what you've read and what you haven't read.

Re:Google Groups

[cayenne8]

"Google Groups is a disaster. I have practically stopped using Usenet since they took it over. It is a mess, very unfriendly to users and appears to me to be a deliberate effort to wipe out Usenet. I expect to see a "pay" information system emerge from this mess by who other than... Google."

Does your ISP not offer free USENET access? I've yet to join one that didn't...with article above being the first time I've seen one that said they'd stop offering it...

Re:Google Groups

[Dogtanian]

I liked the Deja interface. Pre "consumer portal", that is.

You mean when it went from deja-news.com to deja.com.. sorry, I meant deja-fruit-machine.com.

That was ******* *horrible*.

Good old days my arse; thank $DEITY Google took it over. Don't forget that even the old deja-news.com had (animated IIRC) banner ads.

Re:Google Groups

[Dogtanian]

Are you talking about the time that it takes for the article to be propogated to other NNTP servers? That's been a problem with some Usenet server since the beginning :)

Au contraire, the post normally appears on other news servers fairly quickly; but it doesn't appear on *Google's* for #%#$&@ hours!!!

Go figure that one out if you can.

Re:Google Groups

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

It had ads - but the group / thread navigation was the best, lightweight, no-DHTML I've seen. Message boards should be like this.

Re:Google Groups

[MightyMartian]

> Right. So next time I have a problem with ethernet
> drivers under linux, I just phone everybody who
> runs it?
>
> You don't know what usenet is, do you?

I've been using Usenet for over a decade. I just find these ludicrous demands that smtp and nntp should be instaneous protocols silly. That's not their intent, and while they've benefited greatly from the age of broadband, they still are not meant to be instaneous. As they rely upon middle men (MTAs and news servers) there's always the chance for delay.

Re:Google Groups

[EnronHaliburton2004]

That's wierd... I've posted a few posts in the last few days and they all showed up within a few minutes...

Re:Google Groups

[oKtosiTe]

It was a wild guess, obviously I never use google groups.

Re:Google Groups

[bob beta]

Flamebait? Damn. What about people who want to read news on a terminal? I don't think the Google Groups interface will work properly in Lynx.

I'm sorry. It's not a solution.

Re:Google Groups

[Old Wolf]

Major flaw - you can't post from the old interface (and yet another un-intuitive user interface message)

Re:Google Groups

[Dogtanian]

To be fair, it's at least two months since I last posted something via Google groups; it might have changed since then, though I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Re:Google Groups

[CreatureComfort]

And here I thought /. was where you have serious ongoing conversations.

I must be new here.

What?

[jim_v2000]

What's this Usenet thing again?

Re:What?

[nizo]

It is like email only spammier. Viva el spam!

Re:What?

[rainman_bc]

What's this Usenet thing again?

It's dead, Netcraft confirms it, don't worry about it ;)

Re:What?

[Neil Blender]

What's this Usenet thing again?

Please check out alt.usenet.newbies for more information and answers to your questions.

Re:What?

[welbz]

If you want to speed up the dead of usenet - declare it in the mainstream press as a hang out for hackers or paedophiles- just like IRC. (If you believe the claims)

Re:What?

[rlp]

It's some sort of primitive RSS interface for a group blog. :-)

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did you post the same thing twice? It's not all that funny the first time.

Re:What?

[Frizzle Fry]

In Korea, only old people use Usenet.

Re:What?

[IronChef]

we're all discussing this on alt.usenet.crying.bye.bye.bye.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

or just "pedophile hackers"

Re:What?

[canuck57]

What's this Usenet thing again?

Something that makes Microsoft folders in Exchange look like crap. NNTP readers were more advanced 10 years ago than Microsoft folders are today. Threading for example. Man, I hate scrolling back 300 messages to refer to the last relaated comment.... all because we are biggoted and bias to M$ and socially uncultured in our use of the internet.

The only real problem for usenet today is too much garbage and spam. It was good when it was moderated and abusive users got kicked off the internet for abusing it.

But I guess we are stuck with learning a dozen dfferent web sites.

Re:What?

[TheSpoom]

It's the precursor to forums.

Re:What?

[the_womble]

Its an intarweb thingie a bit like Google Groups

Re:What?

[lewp]

Hell, in the United States only old people use Usenet :).

Re:What?

[dgallard]

Unlike ad hoc Web forums, USENET is based on an
IETF standards. See:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0977.txt?number=977
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0850.txt?number=850

Unlike the web, USENET articles include a
subject, date, and author as part of the
formalism and are intrinsically threaded.

Unlike forums, news articles have their own
URL (news://...) so can be linked to.

Unlike mailing lists, newsgroup articles
reside on servers so they do not encumber
your mail box. You go to them, they do not
come to you.

Almost all email readers come with a news reader.

Finally, although public forums are subject to
spam, the spam problem will be solved eventually,
it is possible to set up moderated newsgroups,
and, one of the least used possibilities of
the internet, private newsgroups make for an
excellent means to collaborative project
management.

GoogeGroups is good. Some posts here point out
that the default reply operation does not
include the quoted post being replied to. But
the 'show options > reply' method of creating
a reply *does* quote the post being replied to.

I consider the lack of that in the default
reply to be design flaw but not a condemnation
of either GoogleGroups or USENET.

Cheers,
Dennis Allard

Re:What?

[philj]

> I hate scrolling back 300 messages to refer to the last related comment

Guh? You can make Outlook sort by thread.

Right-click on "Subject" in the title bar and choose "customise current view". Click "sort" and choose "conversation" in the "sort items by" box.

HTH HAND.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Paedophile hackers? Presumably they spend their time discussing nonce overclocking?

Re:What?

[l3v1]

It's a terribly inefficient method for propagating information across the Internet

You obviously never ever had any good non- or professional conversations on usenet groups, ever. It was the bless of heavens for group messaging. It was very efficient and very easy to use. And very huge amounts of information was delivered. And you didn't need a web browser full of fracking holes and useless web interfaces to do that. It was all simple and good. That was back when spammers were modded out, that is. Today, when the new, brilliant, all-knowing internet-generation grows up, they all very dumbly and dead-seriously know that nothing can be useful unless they use it. And guys like you come up from time to time and show us the brilliance that only dumb ignorance can gather.

Re:What?

[-brazil-]

Inasmuch as it's what web forums attempt (and fail) to mimic adequately, yes.

Re:What?

[3terrabyte]

At first, I thought, that's not funny. Then I realized at 31, it is *I* that is old! How true!

Re:What?

[hackrobat]

RSS does not support deleting a post, but in NNTP you can (the cancel command). I know you're joking, but really RSS is no comparison.

Re:What?

[CharterTerminal]

That's not true! I use Usenet, and... um... oh. *sheepish*

Re:What?

[lewp]

You're not old. You're classic :).

(Bet that didn't make you feel any better!)

Death of Usenet predicted! Film at 11.

[winkydink]

I've been hearing this, since, oh, just after The Great Renaming, which was when? '85, '86?

Let's hope it goes away...

[MillionthMonkey]

...and takes with it those stupid posts to alt.drugs I wrote in college...

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[sterno]

Nope. Google has them all. Your career in politics is toast.

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[enosys]

Nope. Google has them all. Your career in politics is toast.

You mean like George Bush?

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[sterno]

Okay. Hire Rove and you stand a chance :)

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mom?

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[Sebastopol]

I hear that!

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[Seumas]

God, no kidding!

If I'd have known this internet thing was going to take off, I would have posted with much more caution when I was a teenager.

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[Xyrus]

In Korea only old people use Usenet.

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because they are THERE, dosn't mean anyone can ever GET them. GoogleDejaNews: we found a way to make USENET even LESS useful.

Re:Let's hope it goes away...

[Anonymous Coward]

Grand High Imperator isn't a political post, but it seems to be where he sees himself.

Free Usenet via web

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out http://www.talkaboutnetwork.com/

Re:Free Usenet via web

[Elvon Livengood]

Check out http://www.talkaboutnetwork.com/

Worse than Google groups. Here's what they say about themselves:

About TalkAbout Network
The Talk About Network is a family of websites allowing for open communication around the world and in your neck of the woods. We allow members to have conversations (topics) that can last minutes, days, months or years. We allow these to be archived and fully searchable and readable by visitors so they can benefit from the knowledge of past and future visitors.

First thing you notice is the 1/3 of the screen devoted to advertising.

Next you have to find the newsgroup you want. They've decided to reorganize the Usenet heirarchy to suit their own categories, so finding alt.folklore.urban, for example, is an exercise in frustration. Under their "Arts" header, they've got "archaeology", which actually points to alt.archaeology. Looking for sci.archaeology? Try "Science", then "Social Sciences". It's there, along with sci.cryonics, sci.crypt, and sci.crypt.research. (The actual URL will have the newsgroup name embedded in there somewhere.)

You have to register to post replies. I haven't done so - I don't intend to give them my email id. But judging by the posts I've seen in the one newsgroup overrun by newbies from talkaboutnetwork.com (and Google groups), the software discourages quoting and references, and encourages short line lengths.

Talkaboutnetworks is just another company trying to turn Usenet into their own little cash cow and making a mess of things in the process.

No.

[Trillan]

Those who like it, like it a lot. Enough, say, to find another Usenet feed. It just ain't that big a deal.

At the moment, I'm using the google groups beta. If they'd add reply quoted, I'd probably stick with it. As it is, I'll probably get an account with supernews or something sooner or later...

Re:No.

[luxis]

Might want to check out Talk About Network which offers free web access to usenet groups. Nothing like having RSS on your favorite group :)

Re:No.

[Hal_Porter]

At the moment, I'm using the google groups beta. If they'd add reply quoted, I'd probably stick with it

Click on Show Options at the top of a post, then click on Reply.

Then you get a text box with the quoting done.

Re:No.

[Trillan]

Thank you kindly -- that works perfectly! I thought I'd done it once, but I never figured out how. :)

Re:No.

[adremeaux]

You can reply quoted in google groups by hitting Show Options then clicking Reply.

Re:No.

[Tony Hoyle]

If they'd add reply quoted, I'd probably stick with it

It's there already... has been from the start.

Use 'show options' -> 'reply'.

Why be so dramatic?

[Ckwop]

Usenet will be here for another 20 years.. These stories about the "death" of these things are hugely over-rated.

Next it'll be that AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN messenger are killing IRC.

There are plenty of good groups on usenet with loyal posters - it's like trying to kill fortran - it'll only happen over dead bodies..

Simon.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[js7a]

Heh. More articles claiming a service linked to from the front page of Google.com is suffering, please! [tt]

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[vandrad]

Next it'll be that AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN messenger are killing IRC.

I wouldn't mind seeing Jabber take a chunk out proprietary messaging services, though. Pity that fewer geeks use it, but the network effect of the commercial IM services attracts masses of mainstreamers everybody wants/needs to communicate with.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[cnettel]

There are plenty of good groups on usenet with loyal posters - it's like trying to kill fortran - it'll only happen over dead bodies..

Yeah, but in case you haven't noticed, the Fortran coders aren't getting any younger... So, dead bodies, true - not happen, false. :-)

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but in case you haven't noticed, the Fortran coders aren't getting any younger...

Why, you little... eh.. what were we talking about again?

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least in my experience (as a physics graduate student), if your advisor uses Fortran, you'll use Fortran. There's a ton of Fortran 77 code still floating around, and many of the people working with it today weren't alive in '77. Rarely do you get an advisor who has jumped to C. Also, Fortran is still very good at what it does; C can do what Fortran can do as well as it can now, but gives you a lot more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot. And even if you don't use Fortran in your work, take a course that involves computation, and most likely you'll see the code in Fortran (my astrophysics textbook has all the code in Fortran).

Fortran is going to be around for quite a long time, as the majority of the grad students made to use Fortran now will make *their* grad students use Fortran.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Lisandro]

Indeed. Jabber is great (an excellent design IMHO), but i keep my jabber.cz account just for the geek factor right now. No one i know uses it and prefer either ICQ or MSN. A crying shame.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Trillan]

There are plenty of good groups on usenet with loyal posters - it's like trying to kill fortran - it'll only happen over dead bodies..

All you programmers here that? Do your part and kill a Fortran programmer today! I've got three in my trunk (they don't take much space if you're willing to stack them creatively.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Minstrel Boy]

I've got three in my trunk (they don't take much space if you're willing to stack them creatively.

Just PUSH them in until they POP, eh? ;)

KeS

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Trillan]

Beautiful, sir! :)

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Ramze]

my university recently killed fortran, cobol, and qbasic and replaced those courses with c++ and java. Fortran's days are numbered.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

> Disabled US vets 10 yrs after Viet Nam: 10%
> 12 yrs after Gulf War: 89%
> Stop uranium inhalation poisoning!

There is NO WAY that 89% of Gulf War vets are disabled. That would be about 650,000 people and so obvious that no matter how fascist this country has become it would still be all over the news.

According to this article the number is actually about 200,000. That's still very high at about 28% but nowhere near 89%.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[magefile]

Also, Gulf War Syndrome != uranium inhalation poisoning. Not that uranium inhalation from depleted uranium munitions isn't dangerous (I don't know one way or another), but the two are different. IIRC, GWS is a combination of psych damage and some of the medicines, vaccines, etc., soldiers were given.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Council]

. . . that's what GP was implying.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[strelitsa]

And don't forget to bury them face-down, 9-edge first.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[js7a]

I have a hard time believing it, too, but here's the source:

Writing in Preventive Psychiatry ... Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, stated, "... Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War), of them, 11,000 are now dead. By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of 'Disabled Vets' means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems." The disability rate for the wars of the last century was 5 percent; it was higher, 10 percent, in Viet Nam....

"Terry Jamison, Public Affairs Specialist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, at the VA Central Office, recently reported that 'Gulf Era Veterans' now on medical disability, since 1991, number 518,739 Veterans," said Berklau.

I asked vet-advocate Dan Fahey about this and here's what he wrote back:

> Are those figures right? From what I can find in Medline, I was
> expecting something like 35,000 on permanent disability, based
> on mortality rates, which are reported to be quite low. If these
> people are getting sick nine times more than Viet Nam vets, but
> are only dying 1.2 times as often, that's just hard for me to
> believe.

Yes, the figures are right, but their connection to DU is incorrect. This covers all injuries--broken leg, hurt back, as well as Gulf War illnesses.

So, not all of the 89% have Gulf War Syndrome, but a whole lot of them do.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[js7a]

The incidence rate differences observed in cohort studies between combat and non-combat veterans who got the same immunizations and drugs, used the same pesticides, and breathed the same amount if not more smoke from Kuwaiti oil field fires, have ruled out everything but uranium poisoning. The increase in brith defects observed in Basrah (graph here -- birth defects per 1000 births) mirrors that of the U.S. and U.K. troops' children's birth defects over time. The only hypothesis capable of explaining that is uranium inhalation, leading to spermatid genotoxicity from accumulation in the testes.

Having said that, there is no way to explain how the contamination of Basrah occured, because almost all the time during and after the battles when uranium aerosols were being released, the prevailing winds would have been blowing them away from the city. Some people have suggested some kind of food-chain contamination, relating to either goats or birds.

There is a collection of peer-reviewed medical research on the subject here.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[jc42]

Just PUSH them in until they POP, eh? ;)

No, that's what you do with FORTH programmers.

There's gotta be a good (i.e., bad) FORTRAN pun based on "infix" ...

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[calculadoru]

it's like trying to kill fortran - it'll only happen over dead bodies...

oh god please let someone kill fortran, dead bodies be damned, please please please

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[mr i want to go home]

I was in Serbia after the war there. I visited a beautiful farming region in the south (near Cacak). The US had shot at the orchards there with DU ammunition. The only possible reason was to 'ruin' the food.

It kind of suggest that the US armed forces are well aware of the affects of DU, and its potential to contaminate food/water/etc.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[misleb]

Having said that, there is no way to explain how the contamination of Basrah occured, because almost all the time during and after the battles when uranium aerosols were being released, the prevailing winds would have been blowing them away from the city. Some people have suggested some kind of food-chain contamination, relating to either goats or birds.

How far is the wind goign to blow something as dense as uranium compounds?

-matthew

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[f77]

Yeah, but in case you haven't noticed, the Fortran coders aren't getting

Aren't getting what?

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[HeghmoH]

Are birth defects linked to the quality of prenatal care and nutrition? I ask because that graph seems to start climbing right around the time when the UN sanctions really started to hit the country hard. I don't know if this would be true, but it's a possibility; correlation does not imply causation, after all.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk about selective quoting. The poster clearly said "the Fortran coders aren't getting any".

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[js7a]

The only correlations that I can find between birth defects and malnutrition in Medline have to do with folic acid, a deficiency in which causes predominently neural tube malformations. The kinds of birth defects which the Basrah residents and US/UK veterans have been experiencing have not been reported as including neural tube defects; instead consisting mostly of other malformations such as tricuspid valve insufficiency, aortic valve stenosis, and renal agenesis or hypoplasia. Ref.: Prevalence of birth defects among infants of Gulf War veterans in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Georgia, Hawaii, and Iowa, 1989-1993. Birth Defects Res Part A Clin Mol Teratol. 2003 Apr;67(4):246-60.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Anonymous Coward]

-fstrict-aliasing is all fine and good, but it still wont make vectorizing and parallelzing C compilers generate code as good as you get from modern (heh) FORTRAN compilers.

The language is inherently less optimizable.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[Ilgaz]

I know this can/will reach to -1 level but...

I think every clueless trolling story accepted to slashdot and all those "me too" self acclaimed geeks, mods abusing their power to downmod whatever comment they want to censor are nailing slashdot's coffin.

Just 4 months ago "$ thing is dead" post was a joke on slashdot and now its being accepted as a story!

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[slackerboy]

Not really sure why I'm getting sucked into this, but I feel obligated to point out the difference between "soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War)" and "Gulf Era Veterans". This means that while 56% of soldiers who actually served in the Gulf are on disability (a staggeringly high number, in and of itself), the second figure (which you seem to have used to calculate the 89% number) should include everyone that served in the armed forces around 1991 and would therefore include someone that had a HMMWV drive over their foot in Kansas.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[scharkalvin]

oh god please let someone kill fortran, dead bodies be damned, please please please

And while you're at it, please exterminate Cobol too! (PL/1 ?)

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[General Wesc]

Just yesterday I decided to do my cryptography assignment (breaking a Hill Cypher) using FORTRAN. Didn't feel like implementing matrix multiplication myself, and MATMUL was right there.

Of course, I changed my mind, but I was pretty close to teaching myself FORTRAN.

Re:Why be so dramatic?

[HeghmoH]

Thanks for the info. It certainly speaks well for your cause that you're willing to check this out after some bozo like me suggests a random possibility.

Finding web forums

[yahyamf]

Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups. However they are not indexed by centralized servers like Usenet, so it's as easy to find web forums. It would be nice if the most popular forum software like phpBB, VBulletin etc, have some sort of common standard that allows them to be listed by topic, indicating some statistics like number of members, posts, activity so people can quickly choose a forum.

Re:Finding web forums

[arose]

Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.

Like "reading trough a web browser", "no threads" and "you remember what you have read, not your computer"?

Re:Finding web forums

[Phurd Phlegm]

Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.

Yeah, like you can attach cute smileys to your posts.

Well, I guess that's the only clear advantage I've ever seen. Maybe after sixteen years on USENET I'm just set in my ways, but with careful kill file management, you can still find interesting stuff to read and interesting people to interact with.

It has not escaped my notice that Slashdot is a web-based forum. I can't really say that it offers "a lot more features than newsgroups." The only extra feature it offers is moderation, which on USENET is done on an individual (or I should say in-duh-vidual) basis. That way, I make my own decisions about who to ignore, instead of relying on possibly-biased moderators. Not necessarily better, just different.

Re:Finding web forums

[Varg Vikernes]

You know, I was thinking a similar thing some time ago. Given the popularity of phpbb and vBulletin you could centralize this for searching purposes so a master phpbb server could search through all phpbb forums. Or at least those that'd have it configurated so it would be able to. For example you would need to define your phpbb forum in certain categories; if it's a technology forum, what type, what specicif technology forum, primary language used on forum etc. So you could search though the master forum every technology phpbb forum that handles win32 programming for example. We all know you get a lot of impormation on forums, especially when you have some troubleshooting. Just imagine the power if you could search through all the phpbb forums in the world. Maybe you could even extend it with vBulletin and other popular forums. It would be like searching through usenet, but a lot better and much, much poweful.

Re:Finding web forums

[Anonymous Coward]

and let's not forget web forum features such as:

annoying (sometimes animated) avatars, huge sigs full of quotes and graphics for every short post, the karma systems that encourage people to post endless amounts of crap just to increase their forum status, increased need for moderation, etc.

i could go on all day

Re:Finding web forums

[aardvarkjoe]

Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.

Like "reading trough a web browser", "no threads" and "you remember what you have read, not your computer"?

Here's a good article on this subject. Even the worst of newsreaders -- say, OE -- still beat out the best of the web forums. I keep on thinking that it would be nice to write a Slashdot->news program, but I've never found time to do it.

Re:Finding web forums

[Anonymous Coward]

time to go look instead of goinging by what you think http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htforum/index.php

Re:Finding web forums

[B3ryllium]

Two things:

In my personal experience, most usenet programs (especially OE) were fine for getting me registered in groups and posting, but I'll be damned if I'm going to retread everything to find one little post I made that I want to read the replies to. Point being, if Usenet (or, more specifically, a usenet client) had some sort of feedback a la Livejournal's emailed replies, that would make it more of a contender in my book.

Secondly, Slashdot is already experimenting with an NNTP based feed ... but I'll probably never use it, because of the point I just mentioned. Though I do prefer the Slashdot "recent comments" summary for my UID over a plain usenet listing in OE. :)

Disclaimer: I use Thunderbird now, not that OE has changed much in the interim.

Re:Finding web forums

[david.given]

In my personal experience, most usenet programs (especially OE) were fine for getting me registered in groups and posting, but I'll be damned if I'm going to retread everything to find one little post I made that I want to read the replies to.

Any newsreader worth its salt should be able to find your own articles at the push of a button. This is something I like doing, too.

Secondly, Slashdot is already experimenting with an NNTP based feed ...

Really? Where? The FAQ entry still says its not going to happen, partly for advertising reasons...

Re:Finding web forums

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Like "reading trough a web browser", "no threads" and "you remember what you have read, not your computer"?

You forgot the best part about many web forums. The post itself may only be one word like 'Bump!', but the .sig is 2 inches high with 5 blinking gifs of a woman's tits.

If it's a well-designed web forums, you can turn off .sigs , but you need to do that for every friggen web forum.

4 line sigs! 4 LINE SIGS!! JUST USE A SMALL SIG!!! Arggg.....,

Re:Finding web forums

[yahyamf]

Here's a good article on this subject.

I agree with almost all of that article you mentioned. The web forum features I had in mind were the ability to delete posts, memberships, restrict member privileges viewing or posting or both, moderation and similar. These features are useful things like paid tech support, closed communities, educational uses etc.

It would be nice though if there were desktop clients as well for the forum software that would store data on harddisk, according to user settings as well as board policies. This would allow quick searching, viewing, sorting and other similar plus points of usenet clients

Re:Finding web forums

[sploo22]

It looks like the author of that article never used a really well-designed web forum like Invision Power Board. Now I can't speak very much from an administrator's perspective, but having used a number of forums based on IPB and its contemporaries (mainly vBulletin and phpBB) most of the issues raised in the article seem to be not only groundless, but in any case very superficial.

• On a typical web forum, messages are linearly displayed, as a result different topics are intermingled. It's impossible to be sure who is responding to who. True, most web forums are linear, but that doesn't make it confusing at all. On the contrary, it tends to encourage discussions to stay on track and keeps outdated posts from being brought up over and over again.
• There is no way to look at an old thread and only see new messages. Click the "See New Posts" icon.
• There is no way to filter out topics and people you're not interested in. Click the "Ignore" button.
• Every piece of popular forum software feels the need to replace traditional text smileys like :-) with little yellow graphics. It seems like a good idea, but a screen full of little yellow dots draws your eye away from the text, making reading a page straining. Click the "Disable Emoticons" checkbox.
• Users are also typically allowed to include graphics in their posts. While sometimes useful, it's all too often used to include their favorite two or three megabytes of pointless, self-aggrandizing graphics. The administrator can disable images.
• Of course, no forum supports actually hosting the graphics themselves... Most of them provide attachment capabilities, if enabled by the administrator.

And the list goes on. Honestly, this is just a pure troll.

Re:Finding web forums

[sploo22]

I agree with almost all of that article you mentioned. The web forum features I had in mind were the ability to delete posts, memberships, restrict member privileges viewing or posting or both, moderation and similar. These features are useful things like paid tech support, closed communities, educational uses etc.

I'll say it again: have you ever used a modern web forum? All the major ones provide all the features you mentioned.

Re:Finding web forums

[aardvarkjoe]

The web forum features I had in mind were the ability to delete posts, memberships, restrict member privileges viewing or posting or both, moderation and similar. These features are useful things like paid tech support, closed communities, educational uses etc.

You could always run a private NNTP server, which allows you to have most of these features. And then you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Re:Finding web forums

[matthewn]

Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.

Please mod parent "on crack." The rise of Web forums to replace usenet is perhaps the biggest bummer of the popularization of the Internet. (Well, okay, the second biggest bummer -- after spam.) I used to read forty or so usenet groups every day, all in one nice interface that kept track of what I'd read. Now I'm expected to click all around the Web to various forums (fora?), each of which requires me to register in order to post, each of which has a different (and crappy) interface, none of which do proper threading, etc. Feh. Web forums suck.

Re:Finding web forums

[Blinky the Shark]

"Retread everything to find [a direct reply to your own post]"? That's what scoring is for. Upscore *directy replies* to your posts, and there's nothing to "retread". When I open a group in my news client, any threads with direct replies to my posts are listed first, and colorized so that I know they contain direct replies. I open the thread; those direct replies are also colorized to make them stand out. If you learn how to use your software, there's no "retreading".

Re:Finding web forums

[Blinky the Shark]

My latest addition to "careful kill file management" is expressed in my Usenet sig, which currently includes:

Blinky
Who has implemented Usenet Solution #45933:
Now killing all posts originating at Google Groups

Try it; you'll like it. I sure do.

Re:Finding web forums

[bob beta]

You right click and select 'block images from this server' which clears away the junk. Works fabulously well on democraticunderground discussion threads, where people SPAM the forum with graphics.

And the plus-side is that it's a cross-site way of blocking image spam. Anybody in the future who links image spam from the site will be blocked, too.

(I very seldom miss the various bitmaps hosted on images.slashdot.org )

Re:Finding web forums

[danimrich]

Yes, there are more features, but there are more inexperienced users who haven't heard about etiquette and rules than on Usenet. Forums are also at the mercy of the site owner, they may disappear instantly. While there may be hundreds of forums for a particular topic, there are usually just a few newsgroups-Usenet is better structured.

Re:Finding web forums

[arose]

"See New Posts"

Next to useless. A "See Unread Posts" button is needed.

Re:Finding web forums

[Bodysurf]

"Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups."

Actually, a news reader is much easier to navigate, quicker, and easier to search and archive content than any webforum I've ever used. Most webforums want to to register before you can post (some even force you to register to even read), so you gotta sign up for each different one . Most have fascist moderators that have a serious control freak attitude.

I suppose the only benefit of the webforum is all you have to do to access it is typically know how to use a web browser, and not a news reader.

Re:Finding web forums

[Anonymous Coward]

That's there too.

Re:Finding web forums

[StikyPad]

Blinky
Who has implemented Usenet Solution #45933:
Now killing all posts originating at Google Groups

Me too!

Re:Finding web forums

[Queer Boy]

That way, I make my own decisions about who to ignore, instead of relying on possibly-biased moderators.

I make my own decisions on who to ignore.

Re:Finding web forums

[STrinity]

You haven't noticed that TB 1.0 puts a handy little mark next to subthreads that you're participating in? And if that's not sufficient, get Gravity and use the scorefile.

Re:Finding web forums

[STrinity]

There is no way to look at an old thread and only see new messages. Click the "See New Posts" icon.

While that's true, it doesn't work for those of us who set cookies to session-only. Sure, you can whitelist the forum, but that gets tiresome everytime you want to join a particular discussion group.

There is no way to filter out topics and people you're not interested in. Click the "Ignore" button.

If you have to do it manually, it's not really filtering.

Re:Finding web forums

[circusnews]

Personally, I like that you can simply gate most of the forum software to NNTP. I just wish it came standard.

Re:Finding web forums

[1u3hr]

In my personal experience, most usenet programs (especially OE) were fine for getting me registered in groups and posting, but I'll be damned if I'm going to retread everything to find one little post I made

OE is the worst possible newsreader. Real newsreaders have filters, scoring etc to make such things easy. And what do you mean by "registered"? Usenet groups don't require registration (though most servers do, if you're not using your ISP's).

Re:Finding web forums

[dougmc]

On the contrary, it tends to encourage discussions to stay on track and keeps outdated posts from being brought up over and over again.

Who are you to decide when a post is outdated? If people want to bring it up again, they should.

As for staying `on track', the only reason web forums stay `on track' is because the moderators will usually smack you down if you don't. (A double edged sword, more on that later.)

Click the "See New Posts" icon.

Assuming that this particular software has it, and it works as you expect. Every one is different. Also, none of these options that you list work *at all* unless you actually register with the site and log in.

Click the "Ignore" button.

Assuming that this particular software has it, and it works as you expect. Every one is different. And often this option isn't available unless you pay for an account (more on that later.)

Click the "Disable Emoticons" checkbox.

Assuming that this particular software has it, and it works as you expect. Every one is different ...

The administrator can disable images.

Assuming that this particular software has it, and it works as you expect. And assuming that the administrator has actually done this -- it doesn't seem to happen very often.

Most of them provide attachment capabilities, if enabled by the administrator.

Most is a stretch. Some is probably more accurate. And generally they don't offer you that unless you actually pay them for an account. Which makes sense, as images do suck up the bandwidth.

Paying for an account to get access to the features that Usenet has given me for decades is even worse. I wouldn't mind paying $5/month or so, but that $5/month only covers one board. Alas, I don't just follow one group in Usenet, but instead a few dozen. If these all moved to web forums, that would be probably be like $100/month just for some of the functionality I have now with Usenet.

Honestly, this is just a pure troll.

No, I don't think your (you = sploo22) post is pure troll. You've brought up some useful points, but it seems that maybe you just haven't gotten used to a good Usenet newsreader, or have forgotten how functional they are ...

I can add to the list of web forum deficiencies as well :

It's not easy to run a spell checker. Perhaps they offer some java one, but what if you don't let your browser run java? And every forum is different ...

(For example, I suspect I mispelled deficiencies. I before E, except after C?) I could grep /usr/dict/words for it, but I think I'll just write this paragraph instead.)

I guess I could type my post up in emacs, run my spell checker, then post it to the forum ...

How do you save a thread to your disk? Make a bookmark? That might work for a week or two, but sooner or later, the forum will get upgraded, or moved, or shut down, or the content will be expired -- and the link you saved is dead. Same goes for trying to keep a record of everything you've posted. With Usenet, it's trivial.

Suppose you recall seeing something on a forum a year ago. But don't recall exactly where. How will you find it? It's probably expired off the forum, if the forum still exists at all. If so, google probably won't find it. The Internet Archive might have a copy, but that's iffy. With Usenet, you just hit google and enter some phrases and you'll probably find it quickly enough.

Suppose the forum administrator doesn't like you or your views. So he deletes your posts, or worse -- edits them. And there's nothing you can do about it but go somewhere else. Perhaps open your own competing forum?

Of course, I'm typing this into a web forum now. (In

Re:Finding web forums

[McDutchie]

I keep on thinking that it would be nice to write a Slashdot->news program, but I've never found time to do it.

I think someone beat you to it It might even be on your HD already; it's part of Gnus which is in GNU Emacs by default.

Have fun. :-)

Re:Finding web forums

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep on think on thinking that it would be nice to write a Slashdot->news program

Actually, there's one in gnus, nnslashdot.

Re:Finding web forums

[B3ryllium]

I simply meant adding them into my list of monitored groups. And I concur on the crappiness of OE :)

Re:Finding web forums

[Maestro4k]

Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.

• They are sorely lacking a few features that there is no good excuse for. For instance, while they can tell me there's no new posts since my last visit in a thread, I'll still have to load the last page and scroll...... till I get to the first post I haven't read. In my newsreader I can tell it I've read posts and filter by unread. Then I see
• only the posts I haven't read yet. This is not out of the realm of easily doable, many of these forums are running off of PHP anyway, and track last read article, just provide a viewing option to view threaded, unread only. Simple enough, but I've yet to see it.

  How about replies? What really ticks me off about web-based forums is many of the moderator nazis get their panties in a wad if you reply to multiple posts in a thread with, well, multiple posts! You're expected to copy and paste all your replies together, a task that just takes up too much time. If the moderator nazis are going to insist on this, there needs to be a "reply -- add to last reply" button. Frankly it's moronic to insist on this completely, if the replies are lengthy the post quickly becomes unwieldy. People aren't going to read through 100-200 lines of post just to find the part where you quoted and replied to them. This particular failure is because most forums do not use threaded posts, they're just a flat table in chronological order. I've seen a few that thread (Anime On DVD's forums do for instance) but then you get the large threads where it takes 2 minutes to download each page just listing all the headers with links to each post for each level. That's just not a viable option. Usenet readers were handling this better back as far as 1992 in my personal experience, I'm betting it was longer.

  Other things that others pointed out as well that could be easily implemented: kill files & filters. How hard can it be? Most software pulls its posts from a database so it can easily just not display posts by users you don't like. (Hell kill-filing would work BETTER because of forced registration to post on most boards), and many of them already filter, cuss words get replaced for instance. If the filtering to check this and change the words as the post is accepted is there, how hard is it to use that function to filter out posts that have certain user-defined key words in them?

  Why haven't these easy things been done yet? Personally I think there's a big "we aren't Usenet" mentality and many web forum operators wouldn't enable these features even if they were available. Somehow some people think a web forum is "cooler" than Usenet. How they can think that with it being harder to use and read is beyond me. Hell Slashcode, for all its faults, threads and filters better than 99% of the web forums out there. Exactly how long has Slashdot been around now?

Re:Finding web forums

[misleb]

So basically what you are saying is that web forums don't really offer more "features" than usenet. They're simply different beasts that serve different purposes (generally).

-matthew

Re:Finding web forums

[Cap'n Steve]

"Like "reading trough a web browser", "no threads" and "you remember what you have read, not your computer"?"

First, why does being read through a web browser count as a negative? Second, I know at least some software has a threaded mode (ezboard does, for Christ's sake). While perhaps not as automatic as a newsreader, most forums I've seen also mark unread posts.

I actually had an argument on a newsgroup about this same topic. When posters were asked why they still used it, the top responses were that it's more anonymous (i.e. you can download whatever illegal stuff you want), and that they've been there for many years already.

Re:Finding web forums

[blackdragon7777]

How about the fact that it is moderated so that there is a lot less flamewars. All I have ever seen on newsgroups and such is nothing but people flaming each other. That's not worth my time to use.

Re:Finding web forums

[drsquare]

Nah, web forums have some good features. The main one is that it's a lower barrier to entry, so you get to talk to more normal people about more normal things, rather than Usenet which has a mainly nerd slant. There are features like different categories, whereas in Usenet all posts are thrust into one big mess, so you end up digging through all the off-topic posts to get to the on-topic ones.

Also on web forums you don't have to download every single post, possibly thousands, just to get to the one you want. The worst part of Usenet is sitting there whilst hundreds of posts come down one by one, just so you can ignore 99% of them.

There's also only one decent Usenet client: Agent, which you have to pay for. All the rest are unusable garbage.

Many years ago I used to love Usenet. I'd sit there all night downloading hundreds of posts, going through every single one, participating in every single flamewar, but it gets boring after a while. Sometimes you just want to get to the point and get to the topics you're interested in rather than sifting through pigshit for pearls.

Re:Finding web forums

[arose]

Private news servers can be moderated.

Re:Finding web forums

[arose]

First, why does being read through a web browser count as a negative?

Do you like webmail?

Second, I know at least some software has a threaded mode

So does Slashdot, but it's still a pain to read. And you don't get to choose what software your forum of interest will use.

While perhaps not as automatic as a newsreader, most forums I've seen also mark unread posts.

phpBB does that, at least it tries. But marking only happens per topic and each time you log out all topics get marked as read. Very easy to miss stuff.

Re:Finding web forums

[arose]

There's also only one decent Usenet client [..]

But it's not Agent, it's Gnus.

Re:Finding web forums

[VdG]

I use Usenet everyday. Also various web-forums and some simple mailing lists. Each has its advantages.

For me, one of the big advantages of Usenet is the ability to use it offline. I've operated for years with a simple dial-up connection. With usenet I can connect, download the latest posts to my favourite group then disconnect. Web forums require me to maintain a connection all of the time.

I also find that web-based forums are rather more plagued by arseholes. This is probably in part due to obscurity: a lot of the stupid little oiks don't know about Usenet but everybody's got a web browser.

Re:Finding web forums

[jonadab]

> I keep on thinking that it would be nice to write a Slashdot->news program,
> but I've never found time to do it.

Gnus used to come with a backend called nnslashdot, but it hasn't worked for
a while; slashdot changed something slightly that broke it, and it never quite
got fixed, for some reason.

Re:Finding web forums

[0x000000]

"Assuming that this particular software has it, and it works as you expect. Every one is different. And often this option isn't available unless you pay for an account (more on that later.)"

Eh? Pay for an account? There are SOOO many forums out there where you do not have to pay, that you will probably easily find a forum which contains the topics you like to discuss.

"Most is a stretch. Some is probably more accurate. And generally they don't offer you that unless you actually pay them for an account. Which makes sense, as images do suck up the bandwidth."

There are a select view that force you to pay for attachments, the 10+ forums that i frequent, they all have it enabled, and there is no charge for accounts, and even then, is it that hard to use imageshack, and then link to the image via imageshack?

"Paying for an account to get access to the features that Usenet has given me for decades is even worse. I wouldn't mind paying $5/month or so, but that $5/month only covers one board. Alas, I don't just follow one group in Usenet, but instead a few dozen. If these all moved to web forums, that would be probably be like $100/month just for some of the functionality I have now with Usenet. "

Find free forums. There are multiple's out there. There has got to be one which suites your taste, and has the topic you enjoy reading.

"It's not easy to run a spell checker. Perhaps they offer some java one, but what if you don't let your browser run java? And every forum is different ..."

There are extensions for browser that enable this feature. I agree with you though that it is harder to do this. Some web forums support the ability to do spell checking for you when you submit your post, http://broadbandreports.com/ is one of them.

"How do you save a thread to your disk? Make a bookmark? That might work for a week or two, but sooner or later, the forum will get upgraded, or moved, or shut down, or the content will be expired -- and the link you saved is dead. Same goes for trying to keep a record of everything you've posted. With Usenet, it's trivial."

Save it? Easy. If this forum type has a print button, hit it, then go to file -> save as, and select the options you want. Saved :D.

"Suppose you recall seeing something on a forum a year ago. But don't recall exactly where. How will you find it? It's probably expired off the forum, if the forum still exists at all. If so, google probably won't find it. The Internet Archive might have a copy, but that's iffy. With Usenet, you just hit google and enter some phrases and you'll probably find it quickly enough."

Again, from experience, most forums will save all the old threads, and google will index them just perfectly.

On a forum i frequent, we still have threads from back in 1999, which is when the forum was started, and since then we have never lost a post. Google can still find them with no problems at all, and most forums have a search feature.

BTW, you are relying on Google to keep a perfect archive of all the usenet posts, what if they lose an email, or the group dies out and the archive is lost? Would that not be the same thing as a web forum disappearing, google still has a cache of an old site i did, eventhough that site has not existed for the last 3 years now. (Scary really, the bad HTML i used back then :P).

"Suppose the forum administrator doesn't like you or your views. So he deletes your posts, or worse -- edits them. And there's nothing you can do about it but go somewhere else. Perhaps open your own competing forum?"

There are mostly multiple forums for the same topic. Find one that you like. On the forums i frequent, the only reason a admin would step in and delete a post or move it is if it is blatant spam or a flame war. But that would be the same as using a moderated group on Usenet, sure some of them can be deleted, but don't piss off the admin and you should have no problem. Most admins ar

Re:Finding web forums

[Anonymous Coward]

Web forums often have different categories, but it seems to be against human nature for people to follow them, and everyone prefers posting in the general-catchall category. This then results in heavy handed moderators spending all their time moving threads around to where they think they belong, shutting them down when they think they've moved from the original topic (as if this were bad for some reason) and generally being a pain in the neck.

Re:Finding web forums

[Anonymous Coward]

And there's the downside that webforums are moderated so the moderators feel they have to keep all the conversations "on topic," or stop any discussion of topics they think they might get sued over.

Re:Finding web forums

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a very insightful post.

One medium that combines some strengths of news groups and web forums is the mailing list.

You can self-moderate and thread much as with newsgroups.

As with web forums, it's easy to start up a mailing list, and easy (I think) to centrally moderate.

The downside is that they're not as easy to find. But that has its upside too - fewer spammers, at least at first.

I've noticed a lot of technical discussion has moved from newsgroups to mailing lists.

Re:Finding web forums

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nnslashdot for gnus, the king of newsreaders.

Re:Finding web forums

[gfim]

And speed (not!).

Hasn't Usenet been about to die for years, but...

[whoever57]

there are more newsgroups than ever. This is just one free service. There are still other free services -- just because one company can't compete does not mean the medium is dying.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

*scratches head* What's Usenet?

If Usenet falls...

[brucifer]

...and no one is around to hear it, will anyone care?

nail in their coffin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft hasn't said anything about Usenet dying.. so I refuse to believe anything.

Who cares?

[geoffspear]

In other news, [insert random company here] will no longer be accepting email by uucp connection, and is dropping support for BITNET addressing.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

uucp died in '93 to '95. UUnet was, iirc the last holdout; the few extant commercial isps that had offered uucp before then pretty much quit when they switched to solaris and discovered taylor uucp wouldnt run on it.

private, adhoc uucp networks do still exist. when all you have for connectivity is a shitty modem attached to a phone line that may or may not work at any given time, you appreciate uucp more...

"nobody uses usenet anymore"

[Anonymous Coward]

my ex boss, circa 1996. I still use it every day.

Re:"nobody uses usenet anymore"

[winkydink]

I'm sure he wasn't thinking about alt.sex.stories.* when he said that. :)

Re:"nobody uses usenet anymore"

[Anonymous Coward]

speaking of alt.sex.stories...

I don't think usenet is going anywhere...

porn can keep anything alive!

Re:"nobody uses usenet anymore"

[Anonymous Coward]

You, me & around 5 million users are not alone.

WTFROFLBBQ

[graveyardduckx]

I've been scavenging around newsgroups for a _decade_ now. They've only seem to have gotten bigger. Granted I pay for mine now, I don't see them ever going away.

Slow news day on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Another story from last week - "Is Usenet Dying?"

How soon we forget that September is finally over.

Re:Slow news day on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

2000 was last week?

its been dead

[Suburbanpride]

I've been using the internet since 1994 (well, 193 is you count comp-u-serve) and I remember Usenet fondly. It was a great source of information and discussion, but the signal to noise ratio got way to high. By 1999 it was eaiser to do a HotBot search to find relavent information than it was in the spam and troll infested usenet, save for a few good groups. I really doubt that anyone who got online in '97 or later ever used the usenet at all.

Re:its been dead

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so wrong. Usenet is better than it has ever been, just not for discussion.

Re:its been dead

[PepeGSay]

I've used newsgroups since around the same time as you. And I still use them for the core of any troubleshooting searches. The signal to noise *is* too high unless you use some form of search tool though.

Re:its been dead

[RavenSlay3r]

Actually I never really used USENET untill a year or two ago. Now I use it regurlarly. It's great for solving gameing, linux, and programming issues. You just have to find good groups.

The one's I use have fairly low noise/signal ratios, and the same regular visitors year after year...

Re:its been dead

[fsh]

It's only been around since '97.

Oh, wait, I thought you were talking about slashdot.

Re:its been dead

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest problem I've seen with attracting new people to Usenet is that too many people try to read newsgroups with Web browsers. With a real newsreader, it's much easier to find the signal and ignore the noise. It's really an order of magnitude faster than with a browser. I find Google Groups painfully inefficient compared even to the Free Agent newsreader.

Re:its been dead

[Suburbanpride]

I think everyone knew what I meant when I said the signal to noise ratio was high (too much noise) although I did phrase it badly.

As much as people complain about moderation, I think the mod system is fairly effective at keeping the noise down, although good messages sometimes do get modded down while idiotic ones get moded up, but as a whole, it works.

I'm sure there's still some good newsgroups out there, but for me bikeforums.net took over my bike related groups, while gamespot and other gaming websites took over with my need for c&c tips. IRC and then P2P made bianaries a waste of time. I really do think that the usenets time is passing.

How many people still use dail-in BBSs?

Re:its been dead

[mce]

I read Usenet not "for finding specific information" (google is better at that) or for "asking specific questions" (who says I have questions that need solving here and now and that I can ask "in the open"), but mainly to lurk on ongoing discussions of topics that interest me.

For instance, these days I'm tracking a very interesting (to me) discussion on sci.military.naval about how torpodo's actually got fired during WW2 including all the details of keeping the boat from rising in the process etc. etc. This has been going on for a few days now (can't have that on Slashdot, where the topic is only hot as long as nobody tried the "first post" trick and only active as long as it sits on the top page). Because I've been lurking said group for years, I also know who to trust on what topics (try that on Slashdot...). Oh, and I have a very effective killfile for sci.military.naval (try that on Slashdot, where the moderation helps but does not put me in control).

Note that, while I have military connections, this kind of thing is not job related. E-mail lists offers lurking as well, but I don't want to be bothered with e-mails about non-work things I read during lunch time. And I don't want to give out my e-mail adres. With Usenet, my adress only goes out of the door when I actually decide to participate in the discussion.

It's a Joke!

[XanC]

Note that the date of the change is April Fools' Day. Plus, nobody being serious could write "April 1th" as they did.

Re:It's a Joke!

[StikyPad]

Nobody except perhaps the NetNews Team of Freie Universitaet Berlin. Whatever that is.

Re:It's a Joke!

[Bnonn]

How would you pronounce that? "April firtht"?

Imminent Death of the Net Predicted!

[ZiZ]

The title, as well as this story, seem to me to be random, fear-mongering speculation. Yep, it's not free anymore. Is this a big surprise? No. The volume of USENET is immense, and it costs real money to provide a feed. There are still and will be for the forseeable future plenty of news sites that provide full access for a reasonably low monthly fee, and even most of the small ISPs (around here, anyway) provide newsgroup service through the simple means of contracting a larger, usenet-oriented provider to allow their customer base access to the usenet feeds.

In other news, BSD is dying!

Valued Service

[DrKyle]

As long as there are people using usenet to download movies, music, tv shows, games, applications, ebooks, and just about anything else that can be posted on usenet, there will be companies willing to let us pay for that access. Maybe you won't be able to get it bundled with your ISP anymore, but I for one will always have a use for it.

Re:Valued Service

[Anonymous Coward]

hello, wake up, we spoke about usenet as text medium binaries in usenet is just as wrong as html in emails

Re:Valued Service

[Maestro4k]

Maybe you won't be able to get it bundled with your ISP anymore, but I for one will always have a use for it.

• Most ISPs offer extremely limited Usenet (Comcast contracts with Giganews for accounts for Comcast customers limited to 2GB a month, unfortunately header traffic counts so even text-only it's easy to run over.) or not at all. Very few ISPs still have their own Usenet servers nowadays, in large part because the daily traffic volume is just insane. It takes a lot of servers, lots of load balancing, lots of redundancy and lots of bandwidth to really provide a usenet feed nowadays. (You also need to peer with a lot of others to make sure you have a complete feed, the paid providers can work out mutual feeds without extra cost (both are using their bandwidth to send and receive posts so it comes out pretty much even). An ISP's news server would have to pay a provider for a feed (very much not cheap) or just contract out (which is what most of them do, providers are happy to work with you to point a hostname (e.g. news.myisp.net) to their servers so your customers won't even know it's not you providing it.)

• The only real exception I can think of is Texas.net, but that's because they're part of/owned by/etc. with Giganews.

Re:Valued Service

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as there are people using usenet to download movies, music, tv shows, games, applications, ebooks, and just about anything else that can be posted on usenet ...

I think you hit on why USENET is dying. As an ISP we began offering USENET nine years ago. There were about 15,000 groups then and a feed used up about a T-1's worth of bandwidth. Now it uses a good part of an OC-3 for 140,000 groups and all those huge attachments you just listed. There is not enough readership of USENET for even a big ISP to justify that kind of bandwidth cost so I wasn't surprised to learn that most ISP's (including large ISP's) have stopped offering USENET.

Without ISP's promoting USENET, most people don't even know it exists. My suggestion would be to cut it back to about 5000 groups, kill the attachments so the feed bandwidth becomes reasonable again and you might see ISP's offering it as a free service once more (ISP's get free feeds in case you didn't know).

USENET has been highly abused. From the time kids are born all through high school, adults spend a lot of time trying to teach them that if you abuse a priviledge, you lose it. Seems to me this is one more lesson. STOP TRYING TO ATTACH ALL YOUR ILLEGAL SHIT TO EVERYTHING! Or nothing will be left.

Re:Valued Service

[Anonymous Coward]

man, i'm grabbing 10-15 gb a day from my usenet feed ... who still uses p2p nowadays?

Re:Death of Usenet predicted! Film at 11.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're old.

Nails in the coffin

[Anonymous Coward]

..there are all these nails being hammered in Usenet's coffin. Too bad Usenet is at the bar having a beer.

Ouch

[DNS-and-BIND]

Ooo, this hurts. I've used this service for years to read news. Used to be, your ISP would provide a news server the same way that it provides a mail server, web server, etc. Then binaries groups became highly popular, and the cost of a news server skyrocketed. This was seen as an outsourcable expense.

Well, what's next? You used to be able to take for granted there were public news servers out there. This service was the best one, and only offered text groups, which was all I wanted anyway. Now...I don't know. There's just no beating reading real submariners discuss the USS San Francisco (hit an underwater mountain at full speed recently) on sci.military.naval.

Re:Ouch

[Tackhead]

> You used to be able to take for granted there were public news servers out there. This service was the best one, and only offered text groups, which was all I wanted anyway.

A full binary feed is about 1.2TB per day; not within the reach of the home user (Joe Sixpack), nor within the reach of the dedicated amateur (The top 1% of Joe Sixpacks who have a 19" rack in their closet) nor even the Really Generous Corporate Sponsor (Hi, OSDN! Thanks for Slashdot!).

A full feed of text groups, however, is probably only about 2 GB per day - a server that can provide 90-day retention of text groups is well within the (bandwidth and hardware cost) reach of the dedicated amateur who lays out $100-200 or so a month for his or her hobbies.

Because USENET is a store-and-forward network, and because bandwidth and hardware are getting increasingly cheap, there'll always be an open text server or two out there. Worst comes to worst (or is it best comes to best?), there may not be any one open text server that "everyone" uses, but a diffuse network of hundreds of 'em, one or two in every city.

Re:Ouch

[Haeleth]

Used to be, your ISP would provide a news server the same way that it provides a mail server, web server, etc.

Don't they still? Mine sure does, with everything above 512kbps; I always thought it was a standard feature...

They don't carry the binaries groups, but P2P made those obsolete anyway.

Basically, it's nobody's fault but yours if you're getting a crappy deal. Don't whine about free services closing, just take your custom to someone who bundles the service you want with something you're going to be paying for anyway - i.e. find a decent ISP!

Re:Ouch

[Cheerio Boy]

A full binary feed is about 1.2TB per day...

Wow! It's grown quite a bit in the last few years!

It's beyond my capabilities and I have a 19" rack in my closet. Or at least in my laundry room. ;-)

Re:Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooo, this hurts. I've used this service for years to...

...read child porn.

There's just no beating reading real submariners discuss the USS San Francisco...

...and all the cocks they sucked on their last cruise.

Re:Ouch

[Trick]

Worst comes to worst (or is it best comes to best?), there may not be any one open text server that "everyone" uses, but a diffuse network of hundreds of 'em, one or two in every city.

Back in my day we called that FidoNet.

Re:Ouch

[Monkelectric]

Is the usenet still distributed over sattelite? I used to dream of a sattelite feed in the early 90's. But i bet they still cost 1g/month.

Re:Ouch

[DeepHurtn!]

The fact that usenet is so decentralised is my favourite thing about it. Webforums, for example, are entirely under the control of a single entity (whether an individual or a company), and the forum is at that individual's mercy. They can pull the plug (or get hacked, or exceed their bandwidth, or...) anytime. Try to take out a newsgroup, though! You'd have to find every jackass running a usenet server and whack the box with a baseball bat.

Re:Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

...read child porn.

No binaries on that server...he says that, moron.

Re:Ouch

[SQL Error]

A full feed of text groups, however, is probably only about 2 GB per day - a server that can provide 90-day retention of text groups is well within the (bandwidth and hardware cost) reach of the dedicated amateur who lays out $100-200 or so a month for his or her hobbies.
That might even be a bit on the high side.

Back in 2001-2002, I was running a feed of all the English-language groups, and that was less than 1 GB a day.

A text-only server is easy enough to run these days. A full feed is pretty deadly though. In fact, here in Australia, no-one has a full feed.

Re:Ouch

[Fantec]

Nowadays figures are around 1.6 to 1.8 TB a day for a full feed.

Re:It's true! The Death of Usenet.

[Anonymous Coward]

My dear pet hamster (named Usenet) passed away just an hour ago in his sleep. My wife was unavailable for comment.

Oh no!!!111

[shoolz]

Now where am I going to get my fill of messages from newb's asking the same tired questions, messages from usenet police saying 'check the faq', and spam?

Re:Oh no!!!111

[rainman_bc]

And the obligatory AOL response:

Me Too!!

Re:Oh no!!!111

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the point by point bitchslapping those dirty usenet hippies love to dish out.

> Slightly wrong statement

WRONG. X is used by Y via Z

> Slightly more wrong statement

I won't even bother with this part, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about

> etc

etc

Usenet once again an underground geek hangout?

[vandrad]

Between the decline of Kazaa (possible logging of downloads. RIAA lawsuits) and AOL terminating Usenet access, I can't help but think that Usenet might make a comeback among geeks now that it's off the mainstream radar.

Sucks about Individual.net, but network services ain't free to provide. I'm quite happy with a Supernews account at $5.95 a month.

Re:Usenet once again an underground geek hangout?

[AhabTheArab]

I know quite a few people who have recently migrated from BitTorrent to Usenet for their piracy needs. It is an uncapped bandwidth, just as good selection, you don't need to share, all for usually $10-15 per month. So far this seems to be farily safe from the MPAA, although there is no guarantee how long that will last.

Re:Usenet once again an underground geek hangout?

[Aeiri]

I'm not so sure, most of the geek community (well, a good chunk of it at least) uses IRC for their stuff, such as Linux distros.

Re:Usenet once again an underground geek hangout?

[wpc4]

Along those lines I was looking for a newgroup provider that provided unlimited downloading. I found and have used http://news.astraweb.com . They have unlimited downloads capped at 2MB/sec for $15 a month.

Re:Wait...nail in coffin?

[cephyn]

its! its! doh. its!

I hope not.

[dj245]

Keeping a news server around keeps the internet transfers in-house, instead of sending packets who-knows-where to a news server on the other side of the country. People will be using newsgroups for some time to come, and the sheer speed from my ISP (Verizon still carries news) tells me that they definitely have a beefy news server a couple branches up the tree of communications. Instead of paying money on a per-gigabyte basis to transfer data into and out of their network, they keep most of it inside where it is relatively cheap. Good move for a large ISP. Maybe not so good for the smaller ones.

Cost is obviously an issue (the bigger the ISP the bigger the benefeit of having dedicated Usenet hardware) but I think its going to be a long time before we say goodbye to newsgroups.

Re:I hope not.

[waynelorentz]

...and the sheer speed from my ISP (Verizon still carries news) tells me that they definitely have a beefy news server...

Lucky stiff. I have Verizon Avenue, and they specifically DON'T support newsgroups at all. If it wasn't free (via my landlord) I would defect to another ISP.

What IS Usenet?

[solafide]

I've seen the term in Thunderbird but what is it? If I haven't seen it, it is very oldfashioned, so good riddance!? Seriously, if there is a better alternative, bye-bye Usenet! It just struck me - is Usenet sort of a mailing list(round robin), a forum, what? Billy

Re:What IS Usenet?

[Pfhorrest]

You got modded "funny" but I'll try to answer you seriously, just in case you're actually curious.

First off, Wikipedia will probably tell you everything you might want to know about it and more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

In short, UseNet is what we had before the web was interactive and thus had things like forums - hell, before there was a web. It functions something like a mailing list. Basically, a big network of news servers all act as mirrors for a vast collection of categorized forums ("groups"). For example, there is the comp group, about computers; comp.sys about specific computer systems; comp.sys.mac about Mac computer systems, comp.sys.next about NeXT computer systems, etc; comp.sys.mac.advocacy, comp.sys.mac.programming, and so on and so on, about more specific topic.

You use your news client to "subscribe" to a group or more, which means that it will contact the news server you use (which may be a free or pay service, may or may not require username and password, and so on) and download all the messages from them, so you don't have to browse through the entire massive collection of groups each time to find the one you want to read. Basically like a bookmark. This makes it different from a mailing list in that there is no actual list of subscribers anywhere - you just tell your client to retrieve messages from that group on your news server. Any messages posted to that group on your server get shared with all the others and mirrored in their copies of that group.

The actual news client and post/response system functions almost identically to email, and a lot of the old traditional nettiquite rules were invented there. Unfortunately thanks to the combined efforts of Microsoft and AOL, and most of the rest of the mainstream email/usenet client makers, most of those rules have been thrown away completely, leading to practices like top replying, which in turn does not encourage people to trim their quotes properly, and encourages people to think in flat (instead of threaded) discussions, and so on... sigh. I miss the old days.

Re:What IS Usenet?

[Queer Boy]

sigh. I miss the old days.

I wax poetic about the old days sometimes, too. Back when BBS's were becoming mom and pop ISPs, AOL and CompuServe were just getting real e-mail, you could count the number of useful websites on your fingers and everyone on the internet was either rich or smart.

Anyway I don't think Usenet is going to be missed. P2P has replaced binary access as a better method for finding files and most web forums are as useful as text. I know there will be a lot of people that will say I'm wrong and I may be from your viewpoint but the amount of junk on Usenet compared to the good stuff is not worth paying for access.

Re:What IS Usenet?

[nEoN nOoDlE]

You know, I'm also unsure of what exactly Usenet is but I believe it's a forum protocol, sort of in the same vein as http. Usenet, though, has been deteriorating in value and users as it's function has been overtaken by websites with their own forums (ie: Slashdot) and blogs, and such. Sorry if I'm mistaken in my assessment, I'm new here.

Re:What IS Usenet?

[MightyMartian]

Perhaps you are unaware that some of us Usenet for something other than downloading files. I've forked over my $16 Canadian, and will keep on using it. Web forums are absolute crap compared to a good news client.

Re:What IS Usenet?

[MightyMartian]

If you're not exactly sure what Usenet is, then how can you say it's deteorating? It's not really like http protocol at all, and more like IMap. It's original intent was as a counterpart to email, and I have yet to find web forums or mailing lists that come close to covering the newsgroups I subscribe to.

Re:What IS Usenet?

[bcattwoo]

The GP has a 5 digit UID. Seeing as he ain't exactly "new here" I don't think you should take his post at face value, i.e. he's joking.

God Bless usenet obscurity.

[Anonymous Coward]

It never ceases to amaze me how many people into file swapping have never hear of usenet. When searching for some new file the will just hit search over and over in a peer to peer system or refresh a torrent website and wonder the "magical" way that some users seem to have new files the day they are released.

I have heard Kazaa/eMule/Torrent users say that the way some people get files so fast is they are a member of a "small elite file trading groups that are next to impossible to get into" I then ask about newgroups and they usually say "What are those" 99% of those guys they think are in the "elite" groups simply use a usenet indexing service and a fast news server. I know people that have been into computers for 8-10 years and know nothing of newsgroups.

Personally I am thankful for this.

The usenet right now remains a sort of "elite" file service, but I assume eventually it may be targeted by the RIAA/MPAA if the kiddies get their hands on it.

Please, if you are in the know, don't tell your friends about usenet.

Re:God Bless usenet obscurity.

[Anonymous Coward]

SHHHHHHHHut-up

free usenet

[stel]

http://www.yottanews.com/ has been offering free 1GB per month accounts. There are plenty of other ones out there as well.

Re:free usenet

[bersl2]

You are awesome.

There are plenty of other ones out there.

None that I've found that offer binary access, until this one.

Re:free usenet

[sybil5000]

Unfortunately the free account is linked to the IP address you register from. Only semi-useful to me. I like to read usenet at home and from work and schlep my newsrc file around between multiple machines and multiple copies of Agent. I could create multiple accounts I suppose, but I'd rather complain!

Re:free usenet

[weighn]

Search for free and publicly accessible usenet servers here.

Re:free usenet

[aonaran]

Tera News has free accounts ($3.95 setup fee)
with 50MB per day limits

Follow the link:
Tera News account setup

Re:Death of Usenet predicted! Film at 11.

[th3space]

god bless you, that was the best thing I'd read all day.

It depends on what you mean by 'nail'

[dgrgich]

Binaries folk will still use Usenet as long as it is around. However, most real conversations stopped happening on Usenet a long time ago.

Re:It depends on what you mean by 'nail'

[MightyMartian]

> Binaries folk will still use Usenet as long as it
> is around. However, most real conversations
> stopped happening on Usenet a long time ago.

Spend two days on talk.origins or rec.arts.books.tolkien and come back and say that.

Usenet died along time ago.

[Dougthebug]

most internet users never heard about this service

That is a bit of an understatement.

I can't think of more than two people I know outside of academia that have ever heard of usenet or newsgroups. Use net has been dead along time. Yes, it still has many users. But theres still people out there browsing the web with netscape 4.1 too, that doesn't mean the old school netscape userbase is flourishing though.

Re:Usenet died along time ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

But the real question is, can I still get my porn, warez, and mp3s?

Re:Usenet died along time ago.

[endus]

Funny how USENET is the first place I go for answers to technical questions and I get an answer every time. If it hasn't been asked already, you can count on an answer within a couple hours. Add to that the high traffic music groups I read, the always entertaining alt.slack...

Just because *YOU* are not saavy enough to derive any value from it, doesn't mean there is no value there. Do you know how many times a week I tell people at my office to "just search google groups" when they are stuck on a technical question? They constantly bother me for stuff that I just end up searching google groups for anyway. Many parts of my job would take twice or three times as long without the ability to find quick answers on there.

F-you and your condemnation of something which you clearly know nothing about.

Re:Usenet died along time ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

F-you and your condemnation of something which you clearly know nothing about.

Awwww, poor baby, did he strike a nerve?? Faggot.

Re:Usenet died along time ago.

[endus]

LMAO. What a pussy. He can't even post his homophobic response under his own name.

Re:Usenet died along time ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

By the same measure, most internet users never heard about slashdot, either. Does that mean that slashdot is dead? Come on, slashdot is already 8 years old! Who wants to see a forum that's almost a decade old?!

that's not all...

[mz001b]

they also stated that they will discontinue gopher access, since this new world wide web thing looks like it may take off.

seriously, usenet still is one of the best ways to exchange information with people on a specific subject. Some of the comp.lang ones are quite good.

Re:that's not all...

[ari_j]

comp.lang.lisp is fabulous. When I was involved there (lost my ISP with a good news server and have tried paying for a news server but demanded a refund due to absolutely terrible quality and desolate group population and message retention), I was really impressed not only by the community but also by some of the names that would show up to post from time to time.

Slashdot sends interviews off to famous programming language architects once in a blue moon. On comp.lang.*, you occasionally discuss language design features with the guy who invented them on a personal basis.

Re:that's not all...

[rca66]

Similar wiht comp.lang.c++.moderated. Stroustrup is around from time to time and all the gurus hanging around, which you will usually see as speakers on conferences and which books you have (or should have) on the shelf.

Re:that's not all...

[vettemph]

>Some of the comp.lang ones are quite good.

If you think thats good, wait till you see:

alt.bin.pictures.monkeyspank.pr0n.yoursister.her fr iend.andthegirlwiththecamera

Re:that's not all...

[sharkey]

since this new world wide web thing looks like it may take off.

What a crock! I just read this book by this guy that invented basic, IBM computers and Dr. Watson, and he said the INTERNET and web thingies are not going to matter. What matters is clouds on your screen and registries and shit.

Effective April 1st?

[jk666]

Perhaps they're just proactive regarding April Fools day.

How is this a nail in coffin?

[StarWynd]

Okay, so people are now going to have to pay for a service that was once free. How is this a nail in the coffin? It seemed that Usenet was dying out until Google came along and included it via Google Groups.

Even though I knew Usenet was out there, it really wasn't until Google Groups that I started using it heavily. I'm a casual Usenet user with a post here and a post there, but most of the time I just don't want all the traffic filling up my mailbox. Having it online in a nice form and easily searchable has made it much easier to work with and find exactly what you need and it's now much more available to folks who never knew it existed in the first place. (What's this little Groups link over here? ...)

One free provider not being free any more doesn't change anything all that much other than being an inconvience for certain users.

Re:How is this a nail in coffin?

[grolschie]

I just don't want all the traffic filling up my mailbox

Set your newsreader to download new headers only.

Re:How is this a nail in coffin?

[STrinity]

It seemed that Usenet was dying out until Google came along and included it via Google Groups.

First off, all Google did was buyout the already popular Deja News service and expand their archive.

Second, having participated in Usenet for over a decade now, you're just plain wrong. Just because you didn't use it before doesn't mean it wasn't thriving. While there are still a number of thriving groups, there are a great number being strangled by political spam -- rec.arts.movies.current-films, frex, gets maybe one on-topic thread per week, and several hundred "BU$H IZ A MURDRING NAZI!" and "WHY DO LIBERAL FAGS HATE AMERICA?" threads. Even three years ago you could still have a serious film discussion in there, but not anymore, and short of moderating the group, there's no way to reverse the trend.

Re:How is this a nail in coffin?

[StarWynd]

During the early days of the internet a large percentage of the people using the internet knew about and used Usenet. And there were vibrant discussions and debates and there still are today. I'm not denying that. However, over the course of time the percentage of people using Usenet went way down. The growth of Usenet was nowhere close to tracking the growth of the internet in general. The new John and Jane Q. Publics of the internet don't know that Usenet exists or even what a newsreader is. You mention Usenet and you get a blank response or a question like "Is that a web site?" Even some of the young tech savvy crowd don't know much about it. They know it as Deja News or Google Groups. I'm saying that based on the some of the college grads we recently hired. I can't make sweeping generalizations, but it does seem to be a trend with the grads the past couple of years.

My reason for mentioning that Google helped to popularize news is that Google helped to bring Usenet to those who didn't know it was there or what it was. Sure, Deja News was around, but that didn't mean anything to John Q. Public. However, John Q. Public uses Google and uses Google a lot, so much so that "Google" has now become a verb. Anyway, just having that little extra link on Googles main page has directed many more people into the world of Usenet. The newsgroups I follow have a number of posters who use Google -- posters who weren't there before Google Groups showed up. I don't have anything to back up this claim other than having seen an influx of new posters around the time Google Groups launched. I may be totally wrong, but it seemed there was a correspondance.

And for the record, I have used newsgroups for about 8 or 9 years myself.

Nope It will be its saving

[Crashmarik]

Look if 80 percent of the freeloaders that cry how much they love usenet but cant be bothered to shell out a few bucks to use it go away you will have a much better service. If nothing else it will allow the system to rid itself of annoying trolls and advertising spammers. You won't see anyone flooding groups they dont like with garbage if it loses them access or if it costs them money.

Maybe it's a good thing

[bonch]

Maybe the best thing for Usenet is to go "underground," so to speak, and have traffic die so the noise level diminishes, and at least a little bit of the former glory might return.

Re:Maybe it's a good thing

[khallow]

Users may come and go, but the USENET is forever? :-)

Number of users hard to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

You expect us to believe that 250 people still use Usenet?

Re:Number of users hard to believe

[antispam_ben]

You expect us to believe that 250 people still use Usenet?

I've seen more than 250 people arguing about Norm Abrams just on rec.woodworking.

subset

[Anonymous Coward]

usenet still makes sense
it beats the hell out of a mailing list
there's no need to carry all the groups
alt.sex.fetish.tentaclerape.binaries
migh t be worth keeping but
who needs 400 gig of recycled p0rn

I don't have much USENET access

[bersl2]

Just private school newsgroups and select "informative" ones. No alt, and especially no alt.binar*.

Does anybody know of a good news server offering relatively full USENET access for free?

Re:I don't have much USENET access

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, any number of ISPs.

If your ISP doesn't offer a free feed, then change to one that does. I know I would if my ISP cut or filtered their usenet feed.

From the story: In a time were (sic) a working news server is not a selling point for ISPs

It is for me.

Re:I don't have much USENET access

[Lord Flipper]

I used Earthlink for a long time as an ISP. Their policy changed to 2 GB per month per account. But it turned out ( I checked about 5 seconds after getting the alert email from E-link) that the 'account' referred to was one of your 5 aliases that came with the basic service. So...I just logged on as one of three 'rotating' accounts and as they neared the 2GB limit, shifted to a 'new' alias, creating aliases to replace 'old' ones, as needed. Bottom line: uninterrupted 30+ GB/month transfers. Meanwhile, I use Giganews ($24.99 unlimited d-loads, ability to saturate any pipe), and sometimes see my posts propagate to Verizon at the same time as on the Giga servers. (The 'path' from home to the Giga servers runs through Verizon, usenetserver, easynews, newsguy, etc... zero propagation probs when one keeps segment parts under 500kb). Usenet dying? Don't hold yer breath.

Can individuals carry the torch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't a bunch of individuals set up their computers as peer-2-peer nodes moving usenet content around?

Seems that's how it started, why can't it continue that way?

USENET never had search

[Anonymous Coward]

USENET was always a fantastic system, but the one thing that killed it was the lack of search integrated into the protocols from the beginning. Once an article expired(or optionally archived), there was never a way to get back to them and interact with them. That is what killed USENET. If you think about it, if you placed HTML into a post on a news forum, it started to resemble a web server.

That said, I have never liked Web based forum software compared to the old USENET.

April what?

[OECD]

Effective from April 1th, 2005, all non-converted accounts will stop working.

And they want us to take this seriously?

Man, a day of awful joke stories on /. AND free usenet stops working? Worst April 1st ever...

The Usenet is alive and vibrant

[Monkelectric]

And if you cant afford a 7$/m subscription to it, we seriously don't want you there.

Re:The Usenet is alive and vibrant

[Anonymous Coward]

...seriously....

Die. I know about the AOL newbs and all the shit you guys bitch about, but this might have been the most disgusting, smug post I've seen in my life.

Slashdot is not the place to ask questions.

[hoovernj]

will this be another nail in the coffin of Usenet

As I remember quite frankly - the last time I asked a question in a news post on slashdot, I got flamed for it.

Are you kidding me?

[Zocalo]

Usenet is still thriving and there still many very active groups out there, some of which actually have comments in them as opposed to "erotica", although there's still plenty of that too, of course. Better yet, now that October is nearly here at last, the signal to noise ratio should go up too. Sure, many ISPs might be giving up their own Usenet servers, but if they don't outsource to a dedicated provider like SuperNews or Giganews, you can always get an account with them yourself. Failing that, you can hunt around for one of the numerous free servers, and there's always Google Groups of course, but they often don't carry as broad a selection of groups.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[elambrecht]

And, if you're just looking for pictures and videos, there's always www.guba.com!

Eric...

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Bloodlent]

Uh, yeah, those are great, but can you post some of the "erotica" ones now?

Free usenet for text is available

[Anonymous Coward]

http//www.talkaboutnetwork.com has basically turned the usenet into discussion forums for those of you too clueless to use a newsreader. You can view the original usnet name in the url . I admit its handy for collecting all of a subject in one place something google groups suck at ie:; http://www.talkaboutautos.com

Re:Signal to Noise ratio review

[StateOfTheUnion]

I remember Usenet fondly. It was a great source of information and discussion, but the signal to noise ratio got way to high.

If the signal to noise ratio gets high, you get lots of (presumably good) signal and relatively little noise. I think that what was meant was that the signal to noise ratio got too low . . . unless spam postings and AOL newbie pollution from Usenet in the 90's is considered signal and original and thoughtful postings from individuals is considered noise.

Time for a p2p usenet?

[Mr Impresario]

Why not create a nice p2p client for the usenet? Everyone hosts a bit of it, maybe even their favorite parts. It could run in the background a la freenet, except without the crypto-slowness.

Re:Time for a p2p usenet?

[Anonymous Coward]

man, if I'm hosting all that p0rn, I want it crypted...

Re:Time for a p2p usenet?

[Anonymous Coward]

man, if I'm hosting all that p0rn, I want it crypted...

What good would it be then?

Usenet is Small!

[entropy123]

IMHO the valuable portion of the usenet are the various groups which answer questions re: programming and review books and the like. When I was learning C++ a while back (on my own) I found the usenet groups/archives accessible through google groups to be invaluable. I, for one, respect those guys who maintain their own archives (is there a place where I may get a copy btw?...don't trust google) Amazon and other websites basically obtain the right to distribute content; at least shut down the servers with all the reviews. The usenet is more freeform, semipermanent, and essentially honest as a ne'er do well disseminator of pure unadulterated opinion...

Movies and the like are essentially worthless compared to the opinions/ideas on usenet. I can't imagine a time when I will be unable to buy something off amazon as opposed to a download from a usenet server. So, strip out the movies, mp3s, and leave the test!

Re:Usenet is Small!

[sinserve]

Movies? MP3s? comp.* anyone?

So?

[SnoopJeDi]

IMHO, Usenet is plently alive and doing quite well.

It won't be going away anytime soon, those jolly pirates will make sure of that.

As far as it not being a big-selling point...

I get my usenet fix through a Giganews subscription with Comcast (1gb down, 2gb up monthly) which is 100% free.

Since people like accounts with less restriction and have plenty of money to throw around, this can get people to buy Usenet accounts with (guess who?) most likely whoever the ISP provides with.

If I recall Oh-so-correctly, making money with more accounts is a good thing for a newsgroup service, so I would think that giving away Usenet access would be a good thing for an ISP to do (if they have the money to spend on the garbage that they do spend it on, why not on Usenet as well?)

And besides, News.Individual.Net is offering the service for 10 EUR yearly, which is roughly $12.88 USD.

If somebody can't afford $13 annually, they probably have bigger problems. Like utilities.

Bottom line: it ain't goin' no-where.

Next On Slashdot:

FORUMS ARE OBSOLETE! TO BE REPLACED WITH MOBILE-TO-MOBILE TEXT MESSAGES ON A LINUX DISTRIBUTION OF A DIY-HACK PHONE THAT BILL GATES MODELED FOR IN A POPULAR MAGAZINE

But...

[vistic]

has NETCRAFT confirmed it yet!?

Hardly going to break the bank

[andyh1978]

The fee: The fee for an account for News.Individual.NET is 10 EUR per year (annual payment), that converts to only 0.84 EUR per month. The price includes VAT at 16%.

news.individual.net gives a decent reliable NNTP service, unlike the one provided by my ISP. 10 EUR sounds fine to me. Might even keep some of the riffraff out :p

Although they'll probably continue to use the Google Groups Beta Abomination.

I laugh at the p2p users

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon gives you free usenet with decent retention in all binary groups (even dvd). With p2p I get upload capped source servers and plenty of crap in the mp3 area. I don't know why people don't use Usenet. I've heard the s/n crap for years, but I get great info in the text forums, pristine mp3s, dvd downloads. I rarely fire up WinMX for the odd request. I find it odd how people dismiss usenet while dealing with the generally shabby shape of p2p.

ME TOO!!!

[typedef]

n/t

Cox retention rates and the Axis of Evil

[qube99]

And they have I hate Cox cable modem at home and have found they have drastically cut back on their retention rates. No longer am I able to download all the warez, movies and music I once was!

Now I read about this....it's the Axis of Evil. GWBush was right!

Re:Cox retention rates and the Axis of Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Kidding aside, I've noticed the same thing in the last month or so. I'm not even convinced it's a retintion issue. It's as if they've gone through and selectively deleted binary parts. Anybody else had this problem, or an explanation?

I got a selling point for ISPs....

[droopycom]

Not true eveywhere, in France, at least one ADSL ISP is offering, unlimited newsgroups access *including binaries groups*.

Binary Newsgroups are now the easiest way to download pirated movies...

Also, Comcast recently outsourced their News service to Giganews - which also carries binaries groups with Divx Movies. You are limited to 2GB/month of News traffic by default (which is more than enough for text only groups) but you can upgrade to bigger quotas or even unlimited traffic for additional fees.

Free Movie : Thats a good selling point!

Well, until MPAA get wind of this and force news server operator to filter those groups... and that shouldnt be too hard for them... oh and yeah I forgot that the anonymity on NNTP is not that great...

Dead? No, Just More $$!

[Newt-dog]

Like anything else good, it will cost you extra dollars to use. The SpeakEasy.net I signed up for a few months ago gives me 1 gig a month free, the rest I have to pay a steep price for. Ok for text posting, but that sure puts a damper on the binaries' groups. ;-)
Goodbye to the freebies!

Newt-dog

Library of Congress

[Baldrson]

It is untenable that the Library of Congress doesn't have the most complete Usenet archive and provide a copy for the cost of duplication. Of course, it is untenable that there aren't multiple redundant copies the world over available for comparison to check up on damage to the archival records.

How many DVDs could contain the entire Usenet archive if pruned to just text? I've gotten close to 30:1 compression ratios out of WinRK.

usenet is bloody outdated, why not go gracefully

[tod_miller]

and make a real protocol?

Why redundantly mirror articles (and I think binary usage of usenet is such a balls up - regarding protocol) to all servers, instead of distributed serving of articles.

So alt.go.fuck.yourself.com is on yourself.com's server dns nameserver pointy thingy, and hosts an nttp port, but then, who owns the data?

I see one reason was anyone could accept posts, but the servers were out of sync...

forums do the same job in a nice carry round with you web interface.

usenet was a global 'one point of access' method, which should work today if we could setup a reversed naming convention for .alt .news .sci .rec .foo and have them go nntp://spears.britney.erotica.binaries.alt and have news readers auto flip them...

so who would run the alt servers?maybe that is why usenet survived, everyone had to load it up, like a redundant array of data...

i am annoyed my isps dont seem to run news servers, but I use google groups, as simple (even tho pisses me off with thier half assed accoutns system, but it is progressing)

Home UseNet

[nurb432]

Well, how about running your own local server... And collect only what you are intrested in?

A workable idea?

Re:Home UseNet

[Anonymous Coward]

that's what leafnode is for.

Re:Home UseNet

[Cheerio Boy]

Well, how about running your own local server... And collect only what you are intrested in?

Only if you have a really fast connection or don't want binaries. The program you should Google for is Leafnode.

The binaries groups are at least 200gig per day pushed from the main news server feeds.

I POOP ON USENET

[Anonymous Coward]

poop

Is this you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when my boss asked me about one of these postings. I had to reply that in my entry, I had drank three bottles of dextromethorphan cough syrup, but this guy only managed 2 1/2.

Re:Is this you?

[wo1verin3]

Why even bother posting as an anonymous coward if you're just gonna tell us who you are :)

Maybe it's an
acquired taste, but I like it. I also drank 2 and a half bottles of
dextromethorphan cough syrup. That was one of my very bad experiments.
Watched Ren and Stimpy for a while and just felt tense and sleepy at the
same time. When for a drive and started seeing geographic hallucinations
everywhere. Also felt the feeling of being alone. Headache. I then passed
out and woke 13 hours later to a 2 day hang-over.

Re:Is this you?

[wo1verin3]

or why do I bother posting if I can't get a link right... here is your post.

Re:Is this you?

[MillionthMonkey]

3 bottles! Wow!
You must have gotten into the range where your bladder is bulging and painfully full but you can't seem to remember how to pee.
Don't do it, kids- it puts pits and holes in your brain.

Re:Is this you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit I wrote that

What an eye roller...

[endus]

The only sad part about this story is that there may not be as many new users of USENET if ISP's aren't offering it for free. Other than that, it's just a bunch of crap.

There are new and old people on USENET constantly. Why, exactly, do you think that this ISP decied not to offer USENET access anymore...because there was no one posting there? Uhm...no. The reason that they stopped offering it is that it is a monster to maintain because of all the traffic. USENET is the most valuable and the most underrated resource on the internet. Yes, I said it, and yes, I mean it. For detailed technical information and answers to tough questions there is nowhere else to go. Product reviews, information on music you want to check out, whatever. It's all there.

Let's keep it real here, okay? Most internet users (including IT "professionals") are too dumb to figure out how to use a newsreader, and FAR too dumb to understand how to evaluate the quality of information you get from google groups. People whine about, "Ohhh, the quality of information on message boards SUCKS, you can't learn ANYTHING from them". What a load of shit. If you have a brain in your head and understand the idea of crossreferencing information before you commit changes on a server that a few thousand people are connecting to, then you can really get a LOT of information from USENET and solve a lot of tough problems quickly. I find good, solid solutions to technical problems CONSTANTLY through google groups. I don't think a week goes by that I don't search it at least 10 times for various things.

Oh, but we have web forums! God forbid people should allow their words to convey their meaning rather than having pretty pictures and fancy emoticons to cover up for the fact that they are just stupid assholes who no one wants to hear from anyway. It's such a joke when you hear people complaining about how "rough" certain web forums are. They don't even know the definition of a "troll" and they think they invented flaming. (Can I get a rolleyes smiley here?).

This is just crap, and everyone cosiging it in this post is an idiot. I'm sorry, but it's true. USENET is a one-stop-shop for all kinds of amazingly valuable information and if you don't see that, then you're missing out. Go download agent and get a clue.

Re:What an eye roller...

[antoy]

Good to see that other people understand how powerful Usenet can be today. Weird technical problems that sound to rare to be documented? You'll find a solution. A good discussion on C++/AI/whatever? You'll find one, or a couple hundred. If this is a dead medium, then show me a real replacement of such size, depth and convenience.

Re:What an eye roller...

[Henrik S. Hansen]

Go download agent and get a clue.

If you had a clue, you'd be using Gnus. :)

Re:What an eye roller...

[endus]

>If you had a clue, you'd be using Gnus. :)

Hahahaha, fair enough. ;)

Re:What an eye roller...

[nrrd]

While I don't agree with the tone, I have to say that I agree with the content... Usenet is Hella' useful.

I spend far more time than I should reading rec.crafts.metalworking, alt.crafts.blacksmithing, sci.engr.welding, and many others. WHen I have a difficult programming question, I can almost always find the answer on Usenet.

The new google groups pretty much sucks. It can be made a little more friendly by chosing "view titles only" and "view as tree".

Re:What an eye roller...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just crap, and everyone cosiging it in this post is an idiot.

"cosiging"? Is that a real word? What does it mean?

Usenet !=Mailbox

[droopycom]

"" most of the time I just don't want all the traffic filling up my mailbox. ""

Indeed my friend, you must be a very casual user.

Usenet traffic is not going in your mailbox. Instead you use another piece of software called a newsreader to go fetch the news of the days(messages) on some newsbox(group) on the news server when you feel like it. And the newsbox never fills up because message have expiration dates. You dont even have to keep the message on your machine if you dont want to...

(newsreader feature maybe included in your email software)

Re:Usenet !=Mailbox

[StarWynd]

I misspoke when I said "filling up my mailbox." What you say is true -- the news is fetched only when you feel like and messages have expiration dates and so on. And I do use a newsreader for a certain select set of newsgroups.

When I said "filling up my mailbox," I wasn't thinking of the disk space being used or things like that, but rather that certain newsgroups have hundreds of messages per day. Even if the messages are threaded, it's still hard to wade through all the cruft and find the threads you're interested in, especially when the interest is causual. I find Google much more suitable for such cases -- I don't have to download anything and Google can find the specific threads that interest me.

As I said above, I do subscribe to a set of newsgroups, all of which are much lower volume (15 - 30 posts/day) and all of which I post to on a semi-regular basis. For those, the newsreader the better option. Which is approach is better is completely dependent on the traffic volume, interest level, and my posting frequency to the group.

Re:Usenet !=Mailbox

[Anonymous Coward]

I find a scoring newsreader (scoring either by poster or by subject) essential to reading high volume newsgroups. It lets me find the interesting threads right away and totally ignore the junk.

Re:Usenet !=Mailbox

[STrinity]

When I said "filling up my mailbox," I wasn't thinking of the disk space being used or things like that, but rather that certain newsgroups have hundreds of messages per day.

Unless you're downloading a group and going offline to read, there's no reason to keep anything but the headers on your computer.

Even if the messages are threaded, it's still hard to wade through all the cruft and find the threads you're interested in, especially when the interest is causual.

Any decent newsreader (i.e., not Outlook) should have filters (killfiles, scorefiles) that automatically find the interesting stuff for you. With something like Gravity, it's trivially easy to reduce a 1000 post-per-day group to 50.

Re:Usenet !=Mailbox

[StarWynd]

Unless you're downloading a group and going offline to read, there's no reason to keep anything but the headers on your computer.

Headers are all I have. The comment is not about disk space, but about total messages.

Any decent newsreader (i.e., not Outlook) should have filters (killfiles, scorefiles) that automatically find the interesting stuff for you. With something like Gravity, it's trivially easy to reduce a 1000 post-per-day group to 50.

My specific scenario deals with how I read news and the newsgroups I'm interested in. Most of the time I subscribe and read a newsgroup just for general informational purposes. What that means is that I don't know what I'll be interested in ahead of time. Of course, there are filters to that remove the total junk messages, but I don't want to limit myself to a little corner of the newsgroup. There have been many times when I've learned something or found something that has really helped me just by coming across it. I wouldn't necessarily have that if everything were scored and distilled for me -- I could very easily look past something. Maybe I'll have to give it up one day in order to handle the larger newsgroups, but I guess it's just a power thing -- I hate to give up control, especially to some program. Heh.

as far as I'm concerned...

[idlake]

As far as I'm concerned, USENET died when people started making searchable archives of it available. I had been using USENET since the 1980s, and, while it had some problems, it was a discussion forum where people discussed things freely and under their own names. USENET also was mostly a mix of academics, students, and corporate computer geeks. Binary newsgroups and postings were few, but the comp.sources newsgroups were the primary vehicle for the distribution of open source software. People got to know each other personally and even made professional contacts.

Once you had to worry about any hasty post coming back to haunt you a decade later, I stopped using it. And the influx of huge numbers of other users also made it a lot less fun for me.

I'm sure a new generation of USENET users found other uses for USENET, after the community changed and after DejaNews came into existence. But that USENET isn't the USENET I grew up with--it's already something different.

right after BSD, Apple, etc...

[javaxman]

Just when I thought I'd never see another "usenet is dying!" story...

It's only 10 EUR a year!

[stesch]

Hey, what's all the fuss about? It's only 10 EUR a year. That's 0.84 EUR a month, 0.18 EUR a week, or 0.03 EUR a day.

Or maybe you just use the newsserver of your ISP. Some people have forgotten that there are still ISPs who care about Usenet.

Re:It's only 10 EUR a year!

[gowen]

Correct. As if Usenet is going to die because a single service (one of the ones I use, as it happens) have decided to charge a yearly fee that's approximately equal to (slightly more than) the cheapest Slashdot subscription.

Imminent death of net ... etc

My Users Don't Want It

[7Ghent]

I run a web hosting/ISP company, and have offered on several occasions to install news software for my users. No takers, though. The one user I've got who responded said he just uses Google Groups these days. Why mess with NNTP when Google indexes everything anyway, I guess?

Re:My Users Don't Want It

[unitron]

Can you recommend a news client with the "look and feel" of the Google Groups net-based thingie from about a year ago (I hear they've screwed around with it since then)?

(I'm assuming that the one that comes with Outlook Express was specifically designed to kill Usenet)

In a time where...

[picoferret]

In a time were a working news server... While free USENET access continues someone could certainly use it to practice their spelling.

what, is there a better source of free p0rn now?

[Anonymous Coward]

really, if usenet goes away, will we all have to scrub web pages for images? Where do you get yours, off P2P??

Hey, a self-admited thief blabs to the world

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it criminals can't help but blab? That's how 99% of those sitting on death row, are. Stupid is as stupid does.

Re:Hey, a self-admited thief blabs to the world

[weighn]

Hey, he posted AC. That's safe innit?

Good riddance, I say

[petrus4]

Usenet needs to die. As I've said before, its only real function is as an online replacement for the conventional mental health system.

There are plenty of other forms of communication online now. Usenet is a relic in the same sense that Ultima Online is to MMORPGs...From the point of view that in UO's heyday, it was the only game of its kind in existence...and so therefore the sorts of brainsick freaks that you customarily encounter on Usenet and those of us who *are* sane were forced to interact with each other...something which ironically made *both* groups unhappy.

The Internet has been slowly moving away from generalised, one-size-(doesn't)-fit-all forms of communication to highly insular, segregated forms classified according to interests and comparitive levels of mental health, among other things. That also is exactly how it ought to be. I'm not saying that I believe any particular group should not be allowed to exist...all should, and all generally serve a purpose. What I *have* always been a very firm believer in however is voluntary segregation. It works, and it's better for everyone concerned.

Re:Good riddance, I say

[dasunt]

Usenet needs to die.

The Internet has been slowly moving away from generalised, one-size- (doesn't)-fit-all forms of communication to highly insular, segregated forms classified according to interests and comparitive levels of mental health, among other things.

Congratulations, you just described usenet!

Its segregated into its own catagories, subcategories, etc (such as rec.games.roguelike.nethack or misc.invest.financial-plan) that are devoted to specific subjects.

In addition, its standardized: I can use a variety of NNTP clients to read messages (currently I'm using the command-line program 'slrn')

It also is rather p2p like, with no central server, but with messages spreading from server-to-server.

I've used mailing lists, web-based forums, and newsgroups. All have advantages and disadvantages. Web forums, being centralized, can have nice /. style moderation.

NNTP, being standardized and decentralized, can't have /. style moderation, but allows other tricks, such as scoring. I tend to killfile certain subthreads I'm uninterested in, which, in the newsgroups I read, are all the filtering I require.

Re:Good riddance, I say

[misleb]

Usenet needs to die. As I've said before, its only real function is as an online replacement for the conventional mental health system.

Isn't this enough to justify its existence? :)

There are plenty of other forms of communication online now.

But none that compare to usenet in scope and function. The NNTP protocol may be replaced, but the functionality that usenet as a whole provides will not disappear. Enough people still want a global, public forum system with a choice in user interfaces. Isolated web forums with crappy, proprietary interfaces don't cut it. Usenet, like Email, allows me as a user to chose whatever reader I want. I can't do that with web forums. I am stuck with their choice of web interface.

The Internet has been slowly moving away from generalised, one-size-(doesn't)-fit-all forms of communication segregated forms classified according to interests and comparitive levels of mental health, among other things. That also is exactly how it ought to be. I'm not saying that I believe any particular group should not be allowed to exist...all should, and all generally serve a purpose. What I *have* always been a very firm believer in however is voluntary segregation. It works, and it's better for everyone concerned.

Really, i think you have it backwards. The Internet, pretty much by definiton, is a combining of disparate and segregated networks and services into generalized and standardized formats. Email (SMTP), Web (HTTP/HTML), etc. What you are suggesting is that we go BACK to the time when we had distinct information services such as private BBS, AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, university networks, etc. All of which required voluntary membership to. All of which had varying level of mental health among users... everthing you describe. It worked, but the trend is to move away from such a model and to generalized "one-size-fits-all" model. USENET was one of the earliest attempts at this. While it might be aging as a technology, it is part of the larger trend of the Internet to move away from segregation.

-matthew

Geez, people actually READ stuff on Usenet?

[syntap]

I just look at the pictures.

Re:Of course

[hdparm]

Talking about headline - my heart almost stopped when I saw it. Not CowboyNeil (in coffin)!!!

usenet will probably never die

[scronline]

too many things can be found there. warez, porn, porn, warez, porn, porn, porn, porn.....You get the idea.

With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[shanen]

Actually, the newsgroups died quite a while ago. I think the historians of epistemology will eventually date it either to the first time the average SNR went negative, or perhaps the last time it touched positive territory. Trivial distinction.

It's not just that the information content has become quite low, but that there is as much disinformation as actual positive content. Add in all the pure noise and various forms of spam, add in a little creamed troll (and I think all trolls should be pureed), and you have a pretty worthless thing.

Since so much of the negative information is political propaganda, my guess would be that the SNR hits the deepest troughs during elections, and in combination with the arrival of perpetual September, I'd guess the first time the average SNR went negative was probably in 1996 or 1998, but without doubt it was dead by 2000, whichever metric you care to use. (Two main metrics would be number of posts or volume.) I suspect it is already in permanent negative SNR territory, though there are still tiny pockets of actual information scattered hither and yon.

Why? I think abuse of anonymity is probably the single largest killer.

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[damiena]

Negative signal-noise ration? Huh?

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Why? I think abuse of anonymity is probably the single largest killer.

Bingo. It was Usenet that started me on the path to being a misanthrope. :) The anonymity allows people to post what they really have in their heads, without the threat of the beating they so richly deserve.

It's the same thing here at work. I overhear people being talked about behind their backs. The slightest flaws or oversights are blown up into mortal sins punishable by eternal bile, although never to the person's face. I can't imagine what people say about me, but I make more than most of them, so I don't care all that much.

It was also Usenet that taught me that strongly held political beliefs are most likely a type of mental degeneration or illness.

Me: We need to know more about any sort of Social Security plan before we can judge it.
KMarxIsGod: BUSH IS A NAZI AND HIS FAMILY IS RAPING IRAQ TO KILL THE WORLD'S FLUFFY KITTENS!
Me: Is there someone else here to talk to?

I mean, that just isn't sanity in operation there. Some might be trolls, but some of these guys will type for HOURS to make some obscure point about how Dick Cheney's second cousin once ran a red light in 1972 without getting a ticket, and therefore the USA is a police state to end all police states.

So I got a Tivo and Netflix account, and just use Usenet to find new music via MP3 groups.

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[rca66]

it's not just that the information content has become quite low, but that there is as much disinformation as actual positive content.

Well, this is even more true for the whole internet. So internet is dead!?

I think abuse of anonymity is probably the single largest killer.

In the german speaking usenet, people use to post under real names, only a small fraction uses alias names. Sure, it's no garantee, that names are faked, but they are very likely identified.

Actually, there are more group with interesting content (be it in english, german or french) than I am able to read on a regular basis. There, the SNR is very high. So, I won't agree with your generalization.

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the newsgroups died quite a while ago.

No they didn't. Check out the comp.* hierarchy for a lot of useful discussion.

The Solaris, Mac, BSD & Linux, Lisp, C, Perl, Python, SNMP, Java groups are still strong. I'm sure I've missed a couple. :-/

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[LihTox]

Actually, the newsgroups died quite a while ago. I think the historians of epistemology will eventually date it either to the first time the average SNR went negative, or perhaps the last time it touched positive territory. Trivial distinction.

People keep talking about this small signal-to-noise ratio, but it all depends on the group. There are some groups with huge numbers of on-topic posts and very little spam (which, by the way, is fairly easy to filter out; do web forums have killfiles?) The problem with the groups I like is there is too much content. There are also a lot of ghetto groups which have been abandoned, but where it works, it works well.

I can only imagine you've been hanging out on the seedier side of Usenet....

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Base10 logarithm of useful posts / right wing troll and penile enlargement spam.

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[shanen]

I said "average SNR" for that reason, and I also acknowledged the continued existence of pockets of actual information, though even in those places you have to beware of puffery these days, which is yet another form of noise. In response to your indirect query, I'll also admit that I have spent far too much time in some alt.* newsgroups, which are leading the way downward. As a former sociologist of sorts, I'm kind of interested in such group dynamics.

However, even with all of those disclaimers and restrictions, I think the situation is very bleak almost everywhere in the public newsgroups. The sense of community has pretty much been lost, and I think that was a big chunk of the value in the "old days". It's not just the constant flood of n00Bs, but the migrations of the hordes of lower class trolls. Sometimes they are effectively "driven out" of other newsgroups by nastier trolls, but at other times they are apparently deliberately looking for fresh communities to "plunder" and disrupt.

I can't pretend to understand their motivations. There is obviously no positive benefit to them, no awards or prizes for contributing to the worst of usenet. However, it is also true that there is no negative sanction or penalty.

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[STrinity]

How do you get a negative SNR? Less than no signal?

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[shanen]

When the "signal" is mostly false information, the SNR goes negative. Or how else do you want to interpret it? Or are you asking for a categorization of the types of newsgroup noise? Trollage? Puffery? Cut-and-paste propaganda from the wildest Web pages? Talon News?

I do have to ask... Can anyone explain why the trolls are so averse to using proper spelling? Is it some kind of badge or something?

Hey, they don't need no stinkin' badges.

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[ketamine-bp]

well, to many, a ratio is not something presented in dB, so perhaps you could as well accept his ignorance (sp?).

btw, i suppose with spread-spectrum (aka spam) techniques one can transmit information (reads: advertisement) even when in a negative SNR time.

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[isorox]

I spend a lot of time in uk.railway and uk.transport.london, SNR is very high. uk.transport's fine to, althoguh plenty off on-topic trolls to brighten the mood (Duhg)

Sure many groups are just spamfests, but groups rarely vanish after they've been created.

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[shanen]

Actually, I don't remember the citation now or even enough details to Google it, but some of the UK newsgroups are prime examples of the worst of usenet. In particular, there were some strong community-based newsgroups that were totally destroyed by trolls some years ago. I think Liverpool was one of the prime targets.

In general, I do think that non-English newsgroups still have decent SNRs, but I think there are two factors involved there. One is relative politeness, with newsgroups providing some of the best evidence that Americans are especially rude people. I would like to think of myself as a gentleman, but gentility has little place in the current usenet. It's a jungle of the rudest sort.

The other factor is relative numbers. Most countries are still lagging behind in net access, and the users are still concentrated among the technical elite. (That's why I like the n00B filter on /. (of course).)

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[albanac]

A great deal of your post is group-dependent. I read a (fairly small) number of groups where SNR is very high, trolls are few and even occasionally entertaining and spam is *extremely* low. However, they are not high-profile groups, and one of them is moderated.

~cHris

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[LihTox]

I said "average SNR" for that reason, and I also acknowledged the continued existence of pockets of actual information...

Fair enough and true. I would point out, however, that the average SNR of all Usenet is only relevant if you spend a lot of time with Usenet as a whole. I restrict myself to a few newsgroups that I like, and so the global state of Usenet doesn't make much difference to me.

However, one set of people for whom it would make a difference would be the people maintaining NNTP feeds, downloading all those newsgroups all the time when a lot of them are defunct. Perhaps Usenet could do with a cleaning out, if that would make a difference (and perhaps make it easier for ISPs to host NNTP feeds again).

Re:With a negative SNR, what's the point?

[Lost Race]

Truth is positive signal, gibberish is noise, falsehood is negative signal. Or something like that, maybe.

Missing

[iordonez]

What this article is missing is the generic "Apple Computer Is dead" quote too! I feel ripped off!

That sigh you hear...

[leonbrooks]

...is cephyn wishing for an "edit" button on slarshdort. (-:

Re:That sigh you hear...

[cephyn]

type a little too fast, and one seemingly innocuous ' gets thrown in there, and bam -- grammar nazi food.

sigh indeed!

Spam Is Killing It Anyway

[nurb432]

The S/N ratio is pretty much killing it anyway, even if it continues to survive techincally.

Times have changed.

Answer:No.

[EvilStein]

Dude, there is so much good porn on usenet... it'll never go away. Even if it's just filled with porn, Usenet will live on.

Oh, there's a few good text groups here and there, but mainly, usenet is for porn.

Praise the lord!

[Dr. Max E. Ville]

FINE! The harder it is to get to it, the better. If only M$ would remove news support from goddamn X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express usenet would be a much nicer place.

Re:Hasn't Usenet been about to die for years, but.

[Blinky the Shark]

Company? It's a *university*, for heaven's sake. We're not talking MS or Google, here.

Web Forums private and potentially lost forever

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO the biggest problems with the waning of usenet and the rise of web forums is that so much information is going to be lost forever and it is getting so spread out that it is simply hard to find. Thanks to DejaNews and later Google I could/can find answers to questions asked a decade ago on a plethora of diverse subjects. Web forums have fissioned this central, diversified/redundant, and archived repository of knowledge into thousands of special forums that exist at the whim of private interests. The information is balkanized and the knowledge can disappear at anytime, forever.

what are you talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Usenet is alive and well. Zillions of posts daily, thoughtful answers to obscure but useful question all over the place, intelligent conversations carried on for weeks. It's got much more vitality than Slashdot. I search and browse it several times a day and post to it several times a week. Predict the imminent death of telephones, English, and burritos, why don't you.

As long as ..

[Capricous]

As long as Pornography is posted, a ripped game is recoverable from pars, and free anime run rampant newsgroups will live!

Spam/Google-posting Is Killing It Anyway

[antispam_ben]

I find that much, perhaps even the majority, of the spam and other abuse is posted through google.com's Usenet posting service with a freemail (usually yahoo.com) account, so my guess is they're ignoring abuse reports.
Usenet abuse reports in general certainly aren't handled in the timely way they were many years ago, thus the spam and other abuse is persistent and growing.

In a time..

[Fussen]

..when the world has collapsed, cocroaches are ruling the cities and Thunderdome is the equivalent of Disney Land;

Usenet will be there.

Search only....

[xbytor]

Google Groups (I still call it Deja News...) is useful _only_ for searches. The UI is not getting any better, if anything, its getting worse over time. I only go there when I need to search across groups for something. For day-to-day reading and work, I read NNTP via Thunderbird. Or, worse comes to worse, I'll run gnus in xemacs. Or, if all else fails, I could probably get by with rn. lynx with groups.google.com don't cut it.

Wait, didn't AOL kill it?

[JudasBlue]

Funny, I remember when everyone was on about too many people on usenet were destroying it: The great AOL newbie flood.

Now too many people are killing it?

Hell, strikes me it is just getting back to normal.

What? NO WAY!

[Quiet_Desperation]

And lose my access to daily updates on how my very existence is threatened by the Bush Global Cabal, alien greys, HAARP, chemtrails, the planet sized spaceship spotted by SOHO and covered up by the legion of dental hygenists, the Clinton Global Cabal, the Bilateral Commission, the Trilateral Study Group, the Quadrilateral Loose Gathering Of Folks, mind control bases in the secret submarine cavers beneath Southern California and, everybody's favorite, Mutant Nazis On The Moon.

Only when you pry my newsserver access from my cold, dead fingers, pedro!

Slay the bitch off I say

[sl4shd0rk]

It's about friggin time. It used to be a good resource, but all it's good for now is research fodder for those people that try to figure out the human phsyche through peer interaction. A simple question turns into an RTFM reply and after a couple more postings, the original subject of the message is lost as the thread denegrates into complete trash. Oh - and groups.google.com is just a mirror of usenet people.. they are not separate entities. I've turned to google (web search) for answers in the longs lists of moderated groups, but it is just not the same wealth of knowledge that was once readily available on usenet (dejanews). Keep pounding those nails in... maybe once it's gone I'll stop wasting my time searching and start buying more books at B&N.

Re:Slay the bitch off I say

[computational super]

A simple question turns into an RTFM reply and after a couple more postings, the original subject of the message is lost as the thread denegrates into complete trash

Huh... that sounds like another forum I read and post to regularly... What was it? It's on the tip of my tongue...

This Article is Another Nail In Slashdot's Coffin

[Anonymous Coward]

Usenet isn't dying folks. Now please move along. Nothing to see here other than yet another example of the joke that Slashdot editors have become.

Recent abuse report response from individual.net

[antispam_ben]

I've used individual.net when my ISP's news server was in the toilet, so I have mixed feelings about their demise, but with abuse responses like this, I have to say good riddance as well. If they won't keep their server from being a conduit for Usenet abuse, then they might as well shut it down. Or perhaps it was reports like mine and abusive users like this one that helped them to decide to shut it down.

I would not have sent this report at all, knowing how slack Usenet is, except for the poster's bullet reference (even though the poster and the object of the post are on different continents). I CC'ed it to the poster's email ISP, with no response. However, the poster piped down a WHOLE LOT after sending this report, so it appears someone somewhere, whether from my report or from something else, gave him a stern warning...

There was some sort of slashdot "Lameness filter" that kicked in when I first tried to post this, so I had to remove some ASCII-character formatting around the quoted section of the FAQ, but this is essentially the email as I got it (except for my snips in brackets).

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 (18:20 -0500), Ben Bradley wrote:

>> I found the following inapropriate post on the newsgroup
>> { snip }. It is definitely abusive (one of a long string of
>> such posts from this poster), and the "have a bullet put through his
>> head" comment appears threatening.

> From:{ snip }
> Newsgroups: { snip }
> Subject: { snip } is a fucking { snip }
> Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 { snip }
> Message-ID:
> X-Trace: individual.net GR1...

Please refer to our FAQ:

5.5.

Q: Someone posted articles that do not adhere to your rules. What do
I do?

A: That depends on the type of offense:

- Violation of a newsgroup's charter
Please inform the author about the usual conventions via e-mail
first - especially if there are particular features in addition or
contrary to the usual rules in de.*. If this does not work, simply
add that author to the kill file / the filter of your news reader.

- Problems with the content of postings
Please clarify your differences with the author directly or use the
kill file / filter of your news reader. In serious cases you can
consider legal procedures, of course.

- Substantial abuse (SPAM, rogue cancel)
Please turn to abuse@individual.net in such cases, attaching at least
one complete article header if possible.

( http://news.individual.net/faq.html#5.5 )

If you consider legal action against the user (for whatever reason):

Please note that we are not allowed to pass or hand out any personal
data without official order (e.g. court order).

Thank you for your understanding.

Regards,
Bettina Fink (Newsmaster Team)
-- Frequently asked questions (FAQ): http://news.individual.net/faq.html

Usenet archives

[harmonica]

Google Groups claims to have 1 billion articles. At about 3 KB per article, that's 3 TB. Compress at 30:1 (although I think that's a bit too high) and you're at 100 GB. So, less than 25 DVD-Rs.

The problem is getting the old data.

The Internet Archive has some Usenet data, but they never accept proposals when I visit that page.

Fidonet, here I come!

[nozzle!]

You can't stop me. I'll move to an even slower, more decrepit form of communication.

Gratuitous Usenet post link

[antispam_ben]

Usenet will be there.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.humor.funn y.reruns/browse_frm/thread/be9f438fbcca75b9/

Seriously

[StikyPad]

I keep hearing these reports that Apple is dying, BSD is dying, USENET is dying, and the one question I have to ask is: what's this USENET thing?

Re:Hasn't Usenet been about to die for years, but.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Compete? On free? How does that pay for the service? Panhandlers at the door?

I can do without usenet. I can do without the myriad IM protocols too, I don't use any of them. I don't think either will go away though.

More ISPs *SHOULD* Charge For USENET...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

How does a company charging for USENET make it dead or dieing? IF *ALL* companies charged for usenet, maybe ther would be less USENET SPAM.

Re:More ISPs *SHOULD* Charge For USENET...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's a brilliant idea. You're a real fucking genius.

Re:More ISPs *SHOULD* Charge For USENET...

[VdG]

I've used news.individual.net since it started, and news.cis.dfn.de before that. My current ISP runs a news server but it's not very good: lots of missing posts.

I'm in the process of changing ISP at the moment and the new one also provides a news server but if that's not up to scratch I will happily continue to use news.individual.net for the paltry annual charge of 10 Euros.

Re:More ISPs *SHOULD* Charge For USENET...

[Dogtanian]

IF *ALL* companies charged for usenet, maybe ther would be less USENET SPAM.

I thought this was insightful for about 5 seconds, then realised that spammers would do exactly what they've done with mail servers (especially since any accounts they paid for would get closed immediately after they violated the TOS by spamming).

Re:More ISPs *SHOULD* Charge For USENET...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

On second though, you're right. Personally, I think the only realistic solution is filters at the mail server and client end. Spammers will always either find an ISP that does not care (it's all about $$$ to them), or just create new accounts when old ones are closed, as you say.

Re:More ISPs *SHOULD* Charge For USENET...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Err, news server end , but you get my drift.

Re:Signal to Noise ratio review

[burns210]

Why not just apply email spam filters and bayesian "smart" filters to usenet posts, blacklists and whitelists, etc. Same concept as a high volume email address. What is the problem?

usenet is dying due to the trolls...

[johansalk]

Over the past 3 years I have witnessed many groups being bombarded by prolific and profane troll posters who have sadly succeeded in putting off and driving away many, many decent regulars. It's extremely, extremely annoying that I swear the immense irritation had often caused me to wish if i could only find those guys and lower them feet first into a giant shredder.

This is great news...

[argent]

Now if the rest of the big "true free speech" uncensored free providers went away, and Usenet became something that you got access to by running your own server because you cared enough to... ... maybe Usenet would come back to life.

another nail in the coffin?

[SCVirus]

More like 3 weeks worth of the state of New Yorks garbage dumped on the location that usenet was laid to rest so long ago.

Re:Death of Usenet predicted! Film at 11.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, as I remember, it was "Imminent Death of Usenet Predicted! GIF at 11!"

Back when GIFs were all the rage, and multicellular organisms were a new idea...

The Ghost of Usenet Postings Past

[MillionthMonkey]

Suddenly, just as Paul was about to clinch the job interview...

250.000?

[Rollie Hawk]

How many significant figures do you need? I've never heard of fractional people.

Re:250.000?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard of European numeric punctuation either, apparently.

Re:It's true! The Death of Usenet.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that Richard Gere is heartbroken over this.

Which group or hierarchy?

[xixax]

Some of the aus. groups I frequent are still great sources of information and expertise, especially timely stuff. Besides a few islands, I'm guessing that alt. is probably a wasteland of pr0n and spam. These "tiny pockets" are far from worthless to me.

The nice thing about Usenet is that no one entity can own the service or content. A bit sad since some of my social groups seem to have ended up on Live Journal.

I've been kind of hoping that Usenet dies a death of sorts, leaving it to people who can be bothered to learn how to use it.

I agree on the effects of anonymity, on more than one occasion we had some clueless Septemer troll's account pulled by sending a sternly worded email to their ISP. Those were the days...

You're high

[edremy]

Or you've never used a decent newsreader.

I cry when I consider how poor of an interface even the best web discussion forums have. Where are my kill files? (I decide what's important- not some moderator.) My intelligent threading? My color coding by topic/author/keywords/threads? Auto-quoting of replies? Keyboard only interface?

Not to mention the enormously greater speed of a good newsfeed. No clicking on links and waiting and waiting- the whole thread is there to browse instantly. Oh yeah- no passwords, logins, etc. And of course, no ads. No blinking crap. Just pure text love.

Plus, you lose the great feeling when you figure out how to forge moderation and post anywhere for the first time :^)

The entire history of web-based discussion forums is an attempt to duplicate a fraction of the features of rn- I was reading Usenet in 1988 with features web-based people can only dream about today.

Re:You're high

[Tony Hoyle]

Not to mention the enormously greater speed of a good newsfeed. No clicking on links and waiting and waiting- the whole thread is there to browse instantly.

You're forgetting that your newsreader probably took 15 minutes to download those threads, plus another 2000 others you're not interested in.

no ads.

Have you *used* Usenet in the last 10 years??? Many forums are completely overrun with ads.

Just pure text love.

Whatever turns you on I guess..

Re:You're high

[edremy]

You're forgetting that your newsreader probably took 15 minutes to download those threads, plus another 2000 others you're not interested in.

Ahh, you've never even used it, have you? Threads downloaded in a few seconds, in the background for all subscribed groups in any decent newsreader. Hell, response was faster (much, much faster) with plain old rn in 1988 than it is with /. today. Pure text takes very little bandwidth.

Have you *used* Usenet in the last 10 years??? Many forums are completely overrun with ads.

Some are. Most aren't, thanks to a bunch of dedicated anti-spammers. (Think of them as /. moderators, only sane.) Most of the rest goes away when it hits the regexp-based killfile. You know, one of those things you can only dream about with a web based forum?

Re:You're high

[Maestro4k]

Ahh, you've never even used it, have you? Threads downloaded in a few seconds, in the background for all subscribed groups in any decent newsreader. Hell, response was faster (much, much faster) with plain old rn in 1988 than it is with /. today. Pure text takes very little bandwidth.

• Even today it's not slow at all for text only groups. Granted I have broadband at home (4mbps down) but I can load up very active text-only groups on Giganews (which has about 6 months retention in text groups, might be more) and it takes maybe a minute to grab all those headers and thread them. Then I chose what to read, and my read pulls the articles down as I go. Very few are large enough to take even a full second to download and display. I even save bandwidth that way by not getting the bodies for posts I don't care about.

• Now if I want to download the million+ headers in a heavily trafficed binary group (the DVD groups seem to have astrononmical header counts) it'll take quite a bit longer, but then I wouldn't be going there for discussion either so would it really matter?

huh

[Anonymous Coward]

what are you talking about a nail -- kb4406@foxvalley.net

Over 100,000 Newsgroups...

[Master of Transhuman]

...and some idiot thinks Usenet is dead...

Only on /.

Let me clue you in. There are dozens of companies selling Usenet access at reasonable prices. Usenet is THE premier - and one-stop - place to get FREE babe pictures (without spyware or popups or dialers or whatever.) It is also an excellent one-stop place to get questions answered about virtually any subject.

No, moron, Usenet is not going anywhere...

Who needs Usenet when there's Slashdot?

[potuncle]

...Going a step farther, with blogs and Google who needs Usenet? [this is sarcasm]

blogging

[PureCreditor]

these days online discussion forums and blogs are so much better than the Usenet it instends to replace. you can change your font's apperance, add URL links, embed images and videos, and even add emoticons. binary posting is already a thing of the past, and it was one of the major spreading sources of viruses.

if u really have a binary file to show all, load it on a website, and simply put the URL on the blog site.

Cracked under pressure from MPAA, SPA, RIAA?

[Linuxathome]

Since usenet constitutes a source for binaries, I'm sure the **AA's are dancing in celebration. If you can't go after the source of usenet, then go after the access of usenet.

Re:Cracked under pressure from MPAA, SPA, RIAA?

[1u3hr]

Since usenet constitutes a source for binaries, I'm sure the **AA's are dancing in celebration. If you can't go after the source of usenet, then go after the access of usenet.

R T F A. news.individual.net was always a text-only service. Almost everyone who wants usenet binaries has been using pay services for years. The binaries are safe; people pay for porn and MP3s, it's the text groups that are suffering, first from spam, second from idiots posting with Outlook who ignore conventions, third from ISPs who provide spotty service; fourth from motherfuckers who use the Hipcrime tools to create huge amounts of nonsense posts to swamp groups they don't like; finally from Google with their groups interface which gets worse every time they revamp it (eg: allowing replies to ANY post, no matter it's 10 years old).

Re:Why? Well, Gopher and WAIS died . . .

[ziani]

Protocols, yes, but applications at heart, all superceded by Google/Yahoo/etc.

Agreed, nothing to get too dramatic over, but we need to accept techno-Darwinism.

Post alternate server links here

[Suchetha]

i'm starting this thread so that people like me (i use individual.net) will have a place to post alternate newsgroup servers

i also use teranews.com they charge 3.95 usd for registration and then 50mb download limit, all groups (including binaries) with a 3 day retention.

i guess i'll pay individual.net for access though. sigh.. there goes more of my budget

Suchetha

That's right, kids. Nothing to see. Go home.

[Fear the Clam]

Nope. Nothing to see here, just go on home back to your flashy flashy, register here, big-fucking-sig, blogs. Go on, set your preferences again and again and again each time you go to a new site. Enjoy the need for an Internet connection to read and post. Who reads all that text anyway? It's all about the animated winky face and the image you linked to from someone's website. Really, kids, web fora are where it's at! It's like baggy pants hanging off your ass, showing your boxers. It's like living in a gated community and adopting the mannerisms of the ghetto. It's like paying $5 for a 30-second ringtone that can't transfer to the next phone you buy. It's the wave of the future, yo.

(are they gone?)

Whew. I've been waiting since eternal September started for those Delphi/AOL/WebTV emoticom/LOL/ROTFLMYA-posting douchebags to give up and go home. Jesus, after all these years, my killfile is bigger than some of my MP3s.

Banking fees may double the price

[hslama]

10.- EUR (US$ 12.-) per year is not much. But the banking fees for transferring this small sum from Switzerland to Germany may well double the price! (Inside the EU fees are lower.) That really puts me off.

Many Swiss users had given up on their ISP's news servers, because of unreliable service. Changing the news server fragments the personal archive of permanently saved postings.

Not another nail

[ppanon]

AOL dropping usenet service isn't a nail in the coffin of Usenet, it's Beatrix Kiddo trying to punch her way out of the coffin.

250.000 registered users?

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Duh, those extra three digits of fractional precision are ridiculous. It's not like you can have fractional registered users...

And only 250 users? What a low-budget operation, hardly newsworthy.

(and yes, i know)

Re:It's true! The Death of Usenet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh, ok. Is that your mother?

Re:what, is there a better source of free p0rn now

[stoborrobots]

Slashdot?

Too much noise for too few users

[msblack]

I persuaded my university to drop our Usenet server because the S/N ratio was low and we had an average daily user base of maybe 25 out of 30,000 students and 2500 employees. Those 25 users were reading primarily the alt.binaries.sex.*, alt.mst3k or alt.binaries.somethingelse groups. Hardly any of those 20 users followed the text groups (I was one of less than a handful of exceptions). The UseNet feed was consuming 50% of our T1 feed. I imagine it would use a large percentage of our current OC3C feed. We expended such a termendous effort maintaining the server and decided to direct our users to DEJA.COM (now Google Groups). Result: no more headaches. I can still Google one of my posts going back to 1992.

Re:Too much noise for too few users

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you carried binary groups?

What did you use for communication within the university? My CS dept. had a wonderful online usenet community, both for help and fun. Each class also had its own newsgroup.

Re:Hasn't Usenet been about to die for years, but.

[Maestro4k]

Compete? On free? How does that pay for the service? Panhandlers at the door?

• One of the commercial Usenet providers I pay for access to has a free server for text groups only. It's a token of goodwill to the Usenet community for starters. Text groups take little storage space and miniscule bandwidth in relation to the binary groups. The most heavily trafficked text groups probably have less bytes worth of postings in a year than most binary groups receive in a day. The people paying the company for access are nearly all binary downloaders. The bandwidth's already being paid for by those subscribers, and they utilise over 99.99% of it as well. (For both incoming and outgoing. Also all paid accounts are unlimited downloads, not quota capped.) It's not costing them much, if any money to provide the text server access for free. It also might encourage future business if a user decides to start downloading binaries.

• I like it as a customer because I can use it to read text groups from work, even if I'm connected and downloading binaries from home with my paid account. I see it as a benefit, not a wasteful offering.

Underfunded?

[Crass Spektakel]

This is total bullshit. Usenet never was cheaper to keep free. Universities are not poor, Usenet doesn't cost a fortune and burn traffic and mantime and cash like hell.

Today a 10MBit flat-server at a provider costs between 30-100 Euros a month and a setup-fee of 0-100 Euros, consisting of a 3Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM and 200GB harddisk. Not a giant server but hell good enough for several 10.000 normal users. I ran myself several newsservers on a much much much smaller system for some 3000 users and it mostly idle (I remember a pentium-100, 128MB RAM, 9GB harddisk and an Amiga3000 with 8MB RAM, 1GB harddisk, both did the job, only the amiga had an average load of 0.2)

Managing a Usenet-Server on a technical level means a one-day-setup and one to four hours work every week.

The administration part (accounts, group-handwork) is more costly but I think it can be also automatized much more. If most forums are happy about a simple "answer the email for registraion" then usenet should be happy to.

About Universities: I know Universities burn traffic like hell. At least in munich. The P2P-traffic alone is 100 times larger than all Usenet-Traffic. And noone cares. They set up Top-Of-The-Notch System (I am not talking about x86, but TOP-OF-THE-NOTCH Sun-Systems with more CPUs than my System has wires on the board) for the frighting task of relaying mails. Huh? I know that mail only increased three times over the last decade in universities but they need a 100 times faster system?

About admins: Most cs-students play most of the time. Play as in "creating debian systems" or "running irc-servers" and "playing with unix in general", sometimes they even really play games. I guess by approaching just the right two people you can get rid of the most work within one evening. Don't tell me this is too complicated. I learned this in the early ninetes within one month and since then it got much easier.

Usenet is about to stay. IRC was never (seriously) founded too and is also about to stay. It will just have to take a different approach. I think within the next five years we will see most Usenet-Traffic migrating to private operated servers. I can even imagine a comeback of some dial-up Usenet-Sites, I have a 3MBit DSL-Link and two ISDN-Lines, why not give access to my var/spool/news? Maybe with more servers than ever before. Usenet will be back to where Subnet came from before migrating to Usenet.

It is cheaper to set up than IRC, it is cheaper to run as IRC, is is less prone to attacks than IRC.

Re:Underfunded?

[computational super]

A while back, I was frustrated by slowness and lack of completeness in my news feed, so I looked into what I could do to speed it up. Well, I discovered that I could get a complete "suck feed" (e.g. all the newsgroups) for about $500/month. This seemed a bit high (at the time, that's what I was paying for rent), so I considered setting up my own side business - a commercial news server - to distribute the cost of the feed a bit. Well, in order to do that, of course, I would need 24x7 hosting, high bandwidth lines (more than a couple of T-3s), huge RAID arrays for retention, etc. etc. etc. Once I finally crunched all the numbers (and I'm sure I overlooked lots of things) I figured I'd need over 1000 customers, each willing to pay me $20/mo (for the same crappy service I was originally unhappy with myself), just to break even. That goes along with the hassle of running a business - I don't know if I'd call running Usenet "cheap".

news.individual.net will be a whole buck a month

[aquarian]

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. I'll pay it happily -- I've been using their free service for a year or two.

Re: [OT] dispersion of U combustion products

[js7a]

Uranyl nitrate, UO2(NO3)2, aerosolizes as a vapor, not as particles like the oxides do, and with a melting point of 60 deg. C (compared to thousands of degrees for the oxides), remains dissolved for a long time. The heat of the munitions' fire waft the UO3 oxide particles and uranyl nitrate vapors fairly high, and they precipitate over a wide area. It is for that reason that they weren't showing up on dust collected in the proportion that they were known to be produced, until this recent study found them in an enclosed fire. You will note by the date on that article -- and the abstract -- that as little as a year ago the scientific community didn't have any clue that there were any +5 and +6 oxidation state U compounds in uranium munitions combustion, even though a quick look into any actinide chemistry reference would have pointed out that they represent about 1/5th of U combustion products.

I'm actually corresponding over email with Dr. Jofu Mishima, one of the scientists who failed to detect UO3 and uranyl nitrate in safety studies he did for the Army in the 70s, 80s, and as recently as this one:

Parkhurst, M.A., J.R. Johnson, J. Mishima, and J.L. Pierce, "Evaluation of DU Aerosol Data: Its Adequacy for Inhalation Modeling," PNL-10903, Richland, WA: Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, December 1995.

I'm apparently the first person to have pointed out to him the fact that uranium is reactive with nitrogen gas at 700 deg. C., far below the temperature at which it burns in air.

I'm totally untrained in this field, but as a taxpayer, I feel like demanding a refund.

Better than sliced bread

[paranerd]

Why do I seem to be the only person on the planet who thinks usenet is better than sliced bread?

Why do I seem to be the only person on the planet who is frightened that a private company has control over the publicly available archives?

Sometimes usenet is my second choice for searching for information; usually it's my first.

I'd rather give up the web than give up usenet.

I'd rather give up my right to vote, or my gun, or my car than give up usenet.

Am I wrong? Or is 99% of the citizenry blind?

Use it all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually connect to usenet 3 or 4 times per week. Huge amount of information there. The groups are a better source of information than any other part of the internet (in many ways). Getting rid of usenet would reduce the internet (usenet performs functions that no other area of the internet can). Getting rid of it would be no better than getting rid of email. Sure it might be polluted with garbage too, but would you like to go back to licking stamps?

usenet is already dead...

[CobwoyNeal]

...and outclassed by forums on webpages.

Unless you're concerned about a few megs of bandwidth, or using a text-only browser on an antiquated system, there's no reason to favor Usenet over HTML based forums.

Re:usenet is already dead...

[Star_Gazer]

Wrong. Totally so. One word: Usability. Webforums sucks at it. Most offer no usable threading, the archives and searchabilty are limited at best and really, reading forum posts with a web browser is as painful as reading mail with web frontends.

In fact, I fail to see any convincing reason that would favor web forums over usenet.

Sven

Re:usenet is already dead...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that none of webforums propagate around the world and have 1.2TB/day feeds...

how did that get modded funny? It's interesting

[Khashishi]

that's a good idea. But, I guesstimate that the total bandwidth used will be considerably larger than a server-client topology, since everyone will be peering everyone else all the time. That might be ok, as no single point will have to bear the burden.

Re:Hasn't Usenet been about to die for years, but.

[xeper]

just because one company can't compete does not mean the medium is dying.

news.individual.net is not even a commercial service. It used to be a project at the Freie Universität Berlin funded with subsidiaries (sp?) until 2002 and was then continued by volunteers.

I assume that the rather low monthly fee of 0.84 is only enough to keep the service running...

The english announcement is here.

Re:Hasn't Usenet been about to die for years, but.

[xeper]

I assume that the rather low monthly fee of 0.84 is only enough to keep the service running...

Ooops, the euro-sign disappeared... it's EUR 0.84 per month...

Usenet is big business for underground activities

[blahplusplus]

Usenet is not going to go away because usenet you pay for usenet access you are assured access to binaries and messages that are months old. You can get everything from apps, movies, games to MP3's and torrents off Usenet. While **AA's of world are going after public websites. Usenet is flourishing for those who dont mind paying for the service.

If anything companies could learn from the usenet model i.e. pay a flat fee, download all the content you want.

Re:Death of Usenet predicted! Film at 11.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're decadent.

If you manage it, you'll be Old too.

Slashdot news!

[Antiocheian]

Maybe its time for slashdot. groups then. Have you ever thought of running your own NNTP server?

Highprogrammer?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of an asshole calls his domain that?

Death of a salesman

[OSXexpert]

Finding alternative feeds for pay or free (got a friend at an ISP?) is never a problem it seems. Usenet news is not going to die any sooner than IRC, or IAM or Google Search. Its been around, it will stick around as long as people find it useful to communicate ideas. I find it as likely that Usenet will die as Mail will discontinue being sent via the postal systems in the world.

Text-only news for less than $20 a year

[grandmofftarkin]

If you are just looking for Text-only news you can get a Claranet mail & news account for about $19.00 a year (£9.99). They also have binary packages. I have used them in the past and they have been pretty good (now I get news on my Panix shell account).

If you want to see the prices in other currencies use the XE Universal Currency Converter.

SuperNews/Giganews are expensive, Clara is cheaper

[grandmofftarkin]

If you want text-only news to replace the individual service (which was text only) then how about $19.00 a year (£9.99) for a Claranet mail & news account? (Clara are a UK ISP who also offer Usenet services. I have used them in the past and they have been pretty good). They also have binary packages.

If you want to see the prices in other currencies use the XE Universal Currency Converter.

Digit

[Graymalkin]

While it is disappointing to see ISPs dropping Usenet support doing so will hardly kill it. The awesome part of Usenet is it is a naturally distributed network of systems. It doesn't take much to carry the text-only traffic of Usenet, especially considering the price of processing power and network bandwidth anymore. Binary feeds take quite a bit more but if you want the basics the barrier of entry is relatively low.

While web-based forums have gotten very popular in the past few years they simply do not have the advantages of Usenet groups. A forum is limited by a single server/cluster's capacity in terms of both bandwidth and processing power. An angry admin, hacker, FBI raid, or backhoe can take down even the largest of web forums. It would take a lot of doing to kill a newsgroup. A couple of yahoos with spare Linux boxes could keep a group going without much effort. Forums also fall down when it comes to availability. To access a thread on a forum you need to be connected to the web. A newsgroup's posts can be downloaded once and held onto for as long as you'd like. This is a feature mailing lists also have over web forums, the entire history of the list can be stored in your local mail spool. While a forum is likely to be public accessible the sum of its content is rarely available for anyone to mirror if they have the prerogative.

Programs like Leafnode allow you to create local mirrors of feeds while Usenet-Web can process those spools to make them available to anyone with a web browser. Emoticons and oversized picture signatures are little reason to use web forums in lieu of newsgroups.

so ... what then?

[torpor]

how does a normal person get a reliable USENET feed these days?

alt.useful.usenet.!die.live.flourish

[kahei]

alt.useful.medium.is.is.is
alt.Sacred.Format.em powers.enables.hosts:
'alt.adjective.noun.verb.ve rb.verb'

alt.mighty.tradition.is.is.is
alt.unending.eter nity.stands.perseveres.endures
alt.rosy.future.da wns.beckons.ensues

alt.patriotic.hymn.sing.chant.wail:

'alt.sacred.format.preserve.obey.defend
alt.sac red.format.continue.go-on.!end
alt.single.adjecti ve.write.post.send
alt.ensuing.noun.stir-in.mix.b lend
alt.triple.verbs.add.finish.append!'

alt.silly.post.finishes.signs-off.submits

Re:alt.useful.usenet.!die.live.flourish

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for that amusing post! I take it you guys are still going on at alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb ?

Re:Death of Usenet predicted! Film at 11.

[Ilgaz]

I wonder if /. editors is at holiday or something. Recent formula is:

"$ thing is dieing" and 400 clueless "me too" posts
"$ thing is opensourced" and 400 "it was abandonware, It sucks! $ things parent company is dead too" posts

It can be easily implemented yes?

Where would all the pr0n be posted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone thought of the damage that the worlds teenage boys would do if they were without usenet porn. They might even go outside and play football or something equally dangerous.

But serriosuly, how many times has this been said before. The one thing that will kill usenet is effective copyright laws, and the closure of any server hosting illegal content.

Anyone cazre to nominate a good news provider ?

[TractorBarry]

Well on a related note my ISP has recently decided to stop carrying 4 binary newsgroups (supposedly temporarily but you know how that works out...)

Coupled with the fact their binary groups retention seems a lot worse than it used to be (I don't remember any announcement of a change in policy but it's now utterly crap) I'm seriously thinking of getting a news feed from a third party.

So would anyone care to cheer for their provider ? or recommend any good ones ?

I'd no doubt be able to live with one of the cheap 1Gb a day limit accounts (I'm interested in reasonable binary article retention more than anything) so I've been doing a lot of googling for providers but a solid Slashdotters recommendation might just sway my vote :)

Re:Hasn't Usenet been about to die for years, but.

[arose]

The problem is that you have to sign up with Firstgate to be able to pay.

My Main Use of UseNet ...

[tilleyrw]

I'm sure that a majority of "those in the know", i.e. "those even aware of UseNet and how to access it", use it for only one purpose. As do I.

FREE PORN!!!

• alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica
• alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.asian
• alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.lebian

And the best ...

• alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.GetALife

I am so glad that usenet is finally dead

[cmefford]

So that it will again become useful.

Yes, I provide a text only feed to my subscribers,
and only a few use it, and those that do
wouldn't understand that there is much of
an internet outside of usenet.

I welcome the death of usenet with open arms.

Like many others, I heaved a giant sigh of relief
when AOL announced that having essentially slaughtered
usenet, they were now backing out. Thank God!
Many, how many years? 10?
Now others are saying they too are cutting
off punter access to usenet. Excellent. I, for
one, couldn't be more pleased!

In a word. No.

[SenFo]

Usenet is huge. Why do people keep saying it's dead. If anything, I've seen an increase in the newsgroups I frequent.

Please use NNTP not HTTP for distributing messages

[bluepuddle]

>Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.

The main problem with Web Forums is that they mix up the management of the messages, with the presentation of them to a user.

An NNTP server can successfully manage the meessages database.
An NNTP Client (news reader) can present them to the user in any way which is useful.

If you want better presentation, then improve the _clients_, please don't throw out the NNTP servers.

>It would be nice if the most popular forum software like phpBB, VBulletin etc

Yes, it would be lovely if these actually were NNTP servers instead of web servers!

I've often considered wrting some proxy to tunnel web forums back into an NNTP protocol, so that I could use a sensible reader. But as usual, I've never quite got around to it . :-(

Where's the ObComment....

[whitroth]

Usenet delcared dead, film at 11.*

mark

* First seen on usenet somewhere in the eighties....

like a year ago i was told usenet was dead

[dindi]

Like a year ago i was looking for a usenet based solution for a project ....
a bbs/discussion board + messaging (and other stuff) with a news server as the main "engine" under the hood ....

first i was asked by various friends: "what do you think ? it is not the nineties... no one uses usenet and news anymore"

then i wanted to read usenet/news ... to check what was up....

free services GONE, the ones only with a web gateway offering limited amount of news ...
or servers also offering limited amount of newsgroups ....

and I realised: usenet was dead ....

but why ? really someone tell me why ?
it was a beautiful service when everyone had public access from wherever ...... hey there could be popular things like blog-to-news gateways, or blogs using nntp as their engine ...
or rss feeds ......

dunno, it just plain sucks.

well maybe i am nineties ...

i would still put up a bbs pcboard style with ftp virtual modem running on os/2 ........ but who would visit it when you have that flash enabled world of maybe not even me :)

Re:like a year ago i was told usenet was dead

[petrus4]

>and I realised: usenet was dead ....
>but why ? really someone tell me why ?

a) The Internet became mainstream.

b) Because of a), the main group using Usenet shifted from programmers/scientists/intellectuals (ergo, people actually *worth* listening to) to brainsick war veterans, (whose primary reason for using it was the fact that they were deranged and antisocial to the point where nobody offline wanted anything to do with them) sociopathic college students, paedophiles/sexual deviants of various different stripes, and the truly hard-core mentally ill individuals who inhabit groups like alt.religion.scientology and alt.conspiracy.

c) Genre/group boundaries virtually aren't respected at all these days...certainly on the alt.* heirarchy anywayz. Crossposting is probably more the exception now than the rule, which means that unless you've got a killfile a mile long, having a coherent conversation is extremely difficult.

d) The protocol has become obsolete and redundant, and has been replaced by special-interest CMS driven Web sites which generally require passwords to join. Because such sites require passwords for posting access, the forums hosted by them do not experience casual, drive-by trolling by the sorts of idiots one generally encounters on Usenet.

e) Also because of a), Usenet began to be increasingly used as a supplement to the p2p filesharing networks, which also is an application that the protocol was never designed for. Hence, not only did this result in some of the text-related traffic dropping off, it meant ISPs were now being asked to carry an obscure, dying protocol with an increasing level of large binary traffic, free of charge.

f) Again because of a), Usenet has now also been inundated with a very high degree of spam. So this, taken in conjunction with the rest of the above, have together had the result of making the protocol largely unusable, and certainly undesirable when compared to the alternatives. Even its' destributed nature has been made obselete by such advances as Yahoo groups...traffic through those go to everyone who wants it, and nobody who doesn't. The groups are also generally moderated in order to ensure intelligent/sane discussion, and to filter out spam. In other words, the available alternatives to Usenet are superior in every possible respect.

Re:like a year ago i was told usenet was dead

[arose]

In other words, the available alternatives to Usenet are superior in every possible respect.

But their interfaces make them unusable. A private news server beats them all.

Re:like a year ago i was told usenet was dead

[petrus4]

Unusable? They're as usable or unusable as the Web itself.

groups.google.co.uk Inconsistencies

[Dogtanian]

I agree; I always go through groups.google.co.uk. I remember being distinctly unimpressed with the 'new' Google groups, then figuring they'd reverted for some reason.

Actually, I think what happened was that if you go through google.com (as I always did anyway), it redirects you to google.co.uk now; then if you click on 'groups', it (google.co.uk) then takes you to groups.google.co.uk.

OTOH, if you type 'groups.google.com' *directly* into the title bar (from the UK), it *doesn't* forward you to groups.google.co.uk, as you might have expected. Had me briefly confused until I figured out what Google were doing.

The question is, does 'groups.google.co.uk' work for non-UK users (and why this inconsistency in forwarding/not forwarding?)

Re:groups.google.co.uk Inconsistencies

[lintux]

I'm Dutch, so I usually use groups.google.nl. But I tried the .co.uk before posting about it, so yes, it works outside the UK too.

Can't post from GROUPS.GOOGLE.CO.UK

[Dogtanian]

Apologies for replying to the same message twice, but I forgot to mention something of importance;

You can't *post* from groups.google.co.uk any more; it kept giving me unexplained errors whenever I tried.

Okay, so I was using that address as a neat hack to gain access to the old service, but what if someone just happens to be going through the UK address?

If they're going to maintain the old version without posting support (and this is better than nothing), they could at least forward all uploading of posts to the new system instead of giving vague errors.

They might have changed this now, though.

Off topic, Off topic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheezus H Krist folks, can you at least PRETEND to stay on topic?

Re earlier statement about Usenet needing to die

[petrus4]

>'alt.sacred.format.preserve.obey.defend
>alt.sac red.format.continue.go-on.!end
>alt.single.adject ive.write.post.send
>alt.ensuing.noun.stir-in.mix .blend
>alt.triple.verbs.add.finish.append!'

"Your Honour, the case for the prosecution rests."

Did you hear that?

[Hoi Polloi]

I just heard a scream, as if thousands of Usenet spammers all cried out at once and then suddenly were silent.

(Apologies to George Lucas)

Notes from a server admin

[Just Some Guy]

My ISP dropped its Usenet feed a few years ago. I worked out an exchange with them: they give me a small block of static IPs, and I use port 119 on one of them to host a little Leafnode server. I configured it to drop all binary groups (with a few specific exceptions; one guy wanted to read alt.binaries.pictures.furniture so I let that one through), or messages over something like 100KB in size.

So, everyone was happy. I got my Usenet fix. Their other customers continued to get service. The ISP wasn't out a penny. I got a static netblock. Then, their upstream provider (cwix.com) dropped their Usenet feeds. I was in a mad scramble to find someone to let me "borrow" their feed ("Hey, Bob, mind if I set up SSH port forwarding to pull down Usenet through your DSL account? You do? Darn.") until I finally found news.individual.net a few weeks ago. They explicitly allow you to host your own server, so it was a perfect fit.

However, I'm not so sure about using it as a paid service. First off, it means that Usenet would move into the "paid hobby" category for me. Although that might seem silly, this was something I've always done for fun and introducing money into the equation kind of puts a damper on that. Second, although they seem like perfectly respectable folk, I'm not sure that I want to be sending money to a vendor on another continent. Third, their current TOS is a bit more restrictive than I'm willing to pay for, given that I'm not the only person using my server. If my ISP has a jackass customer that violates the TOS, then I'm personally out the money. Losing a free service because of someone else's actions is annoying, but losing a paid service for the same reason would be on a wholly different level.

So, unless cwix.com magically decides to re-open their server to their paying customers, or I can find another feed to mooch from, my Usenet days (and those of my ISP's other customers) are pretty much over. It was a good run, but I'm quickly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Charges?

[fsbilly]

I can't find the pricing without agreeing to the Ts and Cs. I think that's kinda sketchy...

Screw 'em.

Several of your points are not valid

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The new Google Groups interface DOES mark which messasges are new since your last visit.
2. In threaded mode, I no longer see this behavior.
3. Since you can now associate it with a Gmail account, it's pretty easy to change settings.
4. Frames aren't always evil.
5. They've imrpoved the thread matching in the new version. It's really better.
6. Posts with the no-archive bit DO appear, but only for a week.

Re:Several of your points are not valid

[arose]

So can I view only unread posts? No? Thanks for destroying ease of use.

Re:Several of your points are not valid

[drsquare]

Except, those things are only in the new version, which has enough awfulness to CANCEL OUT all the good new features. The right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away. That seems to be Google's philosophy at least. And I think we can safely say that the 'Don't be Evil' motto is well and truly obsolete.

In Korea...

[e2ka]

only old people are old.

Re: [OT Gulf War vet disability rate]

[js7a]

You and mlyle are correct and I am changing the figure in my sig to 56%.

The sin of apostrophe...

[leonbrooks]

...is almost as terrible as the sin of heresy. (-:

"Burn him at the ¦"