Duke To Shut Down Usenet Server

DukeTech writes "This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke University more than 30 years ago. On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis." Rantastic and other readers wrote about the shutdown of the British Usenet indexer Newzbin today; the site sank under the weight of a lawsuit and outstanding debt. Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.

Comments

...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Zarhan]

Best web forums are somewhere on par with late 1980's news readers. I mean, even *threading* is something that you really don't see at too many places. Not to mention the fact that you have to create a separate account for every forum. And each forum looks just a tad different.

One thing I like about Gmane mailing lists is that you can access them via your newsreader at nntps://snews.gmane.org/.

At my old company they had a discussion board in their intranet that was ran in same fashion as Gmane - simple web Interface and also access via newsreader. It got replaced with a "fancy" Phpbb forum at some point....and that was called progress.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[sakdoctor]

Google killed news groups for me. This might sound a bit of a stretch, but I really loved dejanews, and all the time google group search was orange, and on the main menu, it was an excellent search tool for usenet.

Then one day it turned into a shitty blue forum that nobody uses.

Re:...and there's still no comparable alternative.

[Opportunist]

Yet recently the signal-to-noise ratio went up again. Oddly, with the advent of phpbb and other web based bbs systems. Not so oddly when you look at it closely.

The average user does not want to learn. He knows how to use a browser, so he will invariably prefer a web based bbs to usegroups any day. Now, spammers and trolls go where? Right. Where the larger amount of clueless users congregates.

If we gave it a while, we'd have a great signal-to-noise ratio on usenet again!

This nothing to do with low usage

[Viol8]

Anyone who still uses usenet regularly like me knows they're just as alive as ever so the slow closing down of usenet has nothing to do with declining usage, but in my slightly paranoid opinion I suspect it has everything to do with it not being self funding. Ads simply don't work on usenet (probably because of its text based nature) unlike with web sites and no revenue = no reason to keep the service going.

When it does eventually die I'll miss it since as yet I haven't seen an alternative that works nearly so well and has so many different topics under one roof so to speak.

Fight for control of information

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a silent war on usenet. The piracy-argument is just a cover. The real issue is about editorial control. Usenet remains as one of very few information channels which can not be censored by any single entity, and with decentralised storage as one of its main features. Free speech advocates should really get on top of this.

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Lumpy]

I ran a very small dialup service in 1992-1996 and we ran a usenet server. I also allowed users to run perl scripting for their websites and gave them a shell login.

It's crazy that today you cant find an ISP that gives you 1/4 of the services I used to give users. I bailed when 56K modems became popular as my cost as an ISP went through the roof..

Re:A twinge of sadness at this passing

[Xest]

I don't think you can really blame the pirates, because there's not enough decent performance free usenet servers out there that actually do offer binaries.

Everyone I know personally that uses usenet to download files has an account with the likes of Giganews, certainly I don't know anyone whose managed to find a decent free usenet server that holds all binaries and provides decent download speeds.

I don't even think I've had an ISP in the UK for years now that's had binary newsgroup access, only text. I think it was about 2003 since I was last with an ISP that provided binary newsgroup access.

Really, I think as is often the case with these sorts of things, the only real blame lies with the corporate greed machine that tries to seek out every single penny of profit it can, regardless of the goodwill it costs the company.

I'm not sure what you mean about Usenet not being suited to large binary file transfer though, that doesn't make a lot of sense, because, well, it is, hence why people use it for that. It's generally far more efficient for the job than the likes of P2P in fact.

Re:It's Still Open For Now

[xtracto]

here is a good place to start :)

Funny that they mention such high requirements:

A serious Usenet server system, carrying all of the standard 8 Usenet
| hierarchies, a large hunk of alt.* and various regionals, is typically
| going to need a Sparc 20/HP 9000/7xx series or better, with 64Mb or
| more RAM, and at least 8Gb of disk

I guess nowadays it is possible to have a usenet run as a "virtual machine"

In fact, someone should make a VMWare appliance (or whatever is called for VirtualBox or QEmu with a Linux usenet installed ready to use!

With apologies to Paster Niemoller...

[Tackhead]

First they closer Limewire
First they closed the usenets.
When they came for my router, it was to replace it with a FTTH.
And it was good. ...
Wait... I think I fracked up that one. What were we talking about?

First they shut down TPB, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Limewire, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Newzbin, but I didn't care because I could still download the headers and summarize them with a shell script.
Then they shut down USENET, and when I finally got fiber to the home, there was nothing left to download.