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

Free Usenet via web

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

[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

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 On the contrary, it tends to encourage discussions to stay on track and keeps outdated posts from being brought up over and over again.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

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: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 :)

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.