AOL To Discontinue LISTSERV

alphadogg writes "On December 1, AOL will shut down its free LISTSERV-based mailing-list hosting operations, the company has told mailing list administrators. 'If your list is still actively used, please make arrangements to find another service prior to the shutdown date and notify your list members of the transition details,' an email notice sent out by AOL stated. At the peak of the service's popularity in the late 1990s, AOL was the third-largest provider of mailing lists, serving more than a million users."

Comments

This is huge news!

[MyLongNickName]

I didn't even know AOL was still in business...

Re:This is huge news!

[nospam007]

For you young whippersnappers, before you were born, listserv was/is like Twitter, just without any size limits.

You just send an email to a server sign up^h^h^h^h^h^h^h follow someone or unfollow.

Re:This is huge news!

[acidradio]

Young whipper-snappers won't and don't understand the significance of ^H either.

Re:This is huge news!

[Hatta]

Yes. And USENET was just like web fora, except with all your forums under one powerful interface. And IRC was just like IM, except, well no IRC is exactly like IM.

Why did we need to invent twitter, web fora, and IM when we had Listserv, USENET, and IRC?

Re:This is huge news!

[Zoxed]

> Why did we need to invent twitter, web fora, and IM when we had Listserv, USENET, and IRC?

The few USENET groups I used to follow basically died due to trolls.
The "real" users migrated to Web Forums, sometimes funded by advertising, which usually have some degree of Moderation.

But I really miss the functionality associated with the single interface to all USENET groups, (although you could of course chose *which* tool to use).
Some people tried to write plugins that converted web forums to pseudo USENET groups, but I think they all failed (I had tried one ages ago to read Slashdot in Xemacs/Gnus.)

Re:This is huge news!

[operagost]

AIM didn't have netsplits.

Re:This is huge news!

[residieu]

Yeah, remember when you could have online discussions with decent thread management?

Re:This is huge news!

[Chrisq]

I remember AOL UK suggesting that the towns Scunthorpe and Pensitone change their names to Socnthorpe and Pennistone because people could not register using them (they caught in the primitive obscenity filter). The absolute anger of citizens of these towns was really amusing I remember one person pointing out that thir town was much older than America, let alone America Online and they were buggered if they would change their name.

Another classic of cultural insensitivity was when they told people on the Wales regional forum that they had to post in English and Welsh was banned!

Re:This is huge news!

[betterunixthanunix]

Why did we need to invent twitter, web fora, and IM when we had Listserv, USENET, and IRC?

People do not know how to use their computers, that's why. Prior to Google Groups most people have no idea how to access Usenet, and most still have no idea that half the groups they access via Google are on Usenet. Listservs annoy people because they have no idea how to create message filters and their webmail client (probably Gmail) has some horribly broken method of displaying threaded discussions. Decent IRC clients require some time to learn, and using something like Pidgin makes IRC seem even worse than it really is (and let's be honest, IRC is just terrible).

These thing were developed by highly sophisticated users, to be used by other sophisticated users. In an age where the most common help desk resolution is, "Is it plugged in?" is there any surprise that these systems are so obscure?

Re:This is huge news!

[Klync]

> Why did we need to invent twitter, web fora, and IM when we had Listserv, USENET, and IRC?

Because corporate firewalls blocked everything except port 80. So, everything moved onto port 80.

As an aside, ten years ago I predicted to my colleague that one day we'd see DNS over HTTP, and probably even TCP over HTTP. I've recently seen *both* of those come to pass via /. stories, although I don't have the links handy atm.

This doesn't affect me in the slightest

[Anonymous Coward]

I moved all my stuff to Compuserve last year.

The end of an era

[Ixne]

Next you'll tell me that FidoNet is going away!

Loss of archives is going to be bad

[JoshuaZ]

From TFA:

ne list still somewhat active is the discussion list for AOLserver, AOL's open-source Web server software. The administrator for this list moved it to SourceForge, where the AOLserver code is housed. However, the administrator, Dossy Shiobara, noted that there was no immediate way to move the decadelong archives of this mailing list, along with related announcement lists, to SourceForge. Fortunately, much of the content is mirrored on other sites, however.

Not all of the lists are going to have their archives mirrored. This is going to mean that a fair bit of internet history is going to get lost, and contribute a decent amount of linkrot in the process. While I suspect that most of that will just be inane flamewars, it always saddens me when data that could be preserved isn't preserved. I do hope that someone finds a way to move the archives of the various lists somewhere.

Re:Loss of archives is going to be bad

[omuls are tasty]

it always saddens me when data that could be preserved isn't preserved

Is that you, Mr. Zuckerberg?

Re:Loss of archives is going to be bad

[Paradoks]

Some people from Archive Team (archiveteam.org) are working on it, which means that, most likely, some amount of data will eventually end up on archive.org.

Still, it'd be nice if AOL would say, "Here's all the data we have. Please save it." and present it to archive.org, rather than depend on a group of rogue archivists to not miss anything.

Re:Converting from LISTSERV

[corbettw]

Check and see if fetchmail can handle it, it does some converting from mail box types to others. Also, procmail might work for you.

Just make sure you don't accidentally start sending out those old messages all over again. Probably best to do the work offline, just to be safe.

backspace

[jabberw0k]

Control-H, character 8, is the ASCII code for Backspace, see the ASCII chart.

Re:What?

[Frenzied Apathy]

Yeah, supposedly they're trying to compete with some company called "Apple" and their own "Macintosh" personal computer.

Amazing times we're in...

September

[RMingin]

Can it be? September will finally end?

It's too late, I think. The damage was done.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Subscribed to a few lists

[betterunixthanunix]

For whatever reason, most of the "serious" discussion groups I'm in (working groups, academic discussions, etc.) don't seem to have moved from listservs to webforums

Probably because the interface to web forums is so terrible when compared to a well developed mail client. I have seen serious discussion lists try to switch to web forums, and the result has usually been on of the following three outcomes:

1. The entire group falls apart because they prematurely kill the mailing list, and nobody is motivated to rejoin.
2. Nobody ever goes to the forum, everyone keeps posting to the list.
3. The forum becomes a place for people who are less serious, while the serious discussions remain on-list. This is basically what happened with the Fedora mailing lists; Fedora Forum has a few serious discussions but is mostly new users asking for help (and thankfully receiving it) while the mailing lists are where highly technical discussions tend to occur.

What we really need is something like Google Groups, which allows less serious users to read and post to Usenet newsgroups. If there were a way to get mailing lists and web forums to interoperate, people who just prefer to use web interfaces would not be excluded from the discussions.