Comcast Discontinues Customers' USENET Service

An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has discontinued its provided usenet service, once provided to all its high speed customers. First with the cap put on its customers several years ago on amount of traffic provided as part of the customer high-speed package, as of September 16, the service is no longer provided. Without fanfare, this bastion of the internet is being removed from the mainstream."

Comments

Re:So?

[PainMeds]

Does anybody still actually use usenet for anything other than the binary groups? I haven't touched it in a decade, mainly because the spam got so bad.

Occasionally, you'll find a computer club filled with x-hippies exchanging correspondence solely over usenet; I think they do it for the privacy that comes with ghost towns. Even they have their binary groups, though; mainly fonts and different versions of Maelstrom.

Re:So?

[Pharmboy]

I rather miss using USENET, although it has become less useful over the last few years due to the spam and flood of binary files (which are useful by themselves...). The conversations in a newsgroup is much higher caliber than you find in forums, mainly due to the fact that most people would actually THINK before writing, knowing that someone isn't going to read it 5 seconds later. It is more like the BBS forums of yesteryear, which of course, were born of USENET itself and often a part of.

I wouldn't be shocked if a few years down the line, there comes a reason for people to start using USENET more often, seeking better quality conversation. The primary problem now is that a web browser isn't a very good platform to read USENET posts, what we need is a better app or an overhaul of the system to make it more useable. Agent and other apps are ok, but mainly for binaries. USENET was basically the first use for the internet and hasn't changed any since then.

Re:So?

[houghi]

Filtered out by the providers. I only filter out trolls.
I get perhaps 1 or 2 spam messages per day and that probably because I fetch news every 15 minutes, so the spam filters were not able to pick it up yet and delete it.

slrn is still the way to go for me. Never ever had an issue with the way it thread.

Re:So?

[Mandrel]

Much of the spam's gone away since Usenet became a backwater. This accelerated after Google removed the "Groups" link from their front page.

As well, Gmane gateways mailing lists to newsgroups, allowing both reading and posting with a nice interface, without the need to download every message.

Usenet = Useful

[prayag]

I still use usenet to ask programming questions. . I have loved to follow discussions on comp.lang.c and comp.std.c. I have learned a lot just looking at the archives. I had recently come across comp.lang.python and am excited about

I really think usenet still has a place on the web, a very useful place.

Anybody want out of their comcast contract?

[keraneuology]

This is a significant alteration to the service provided and (certainly) comes with no reduction in cost. Somebody who wants out of their Comcast contract and has the requisite tenacity should be able to get out from under them and switch to somebody else.