Well there's a decent chance you're going to be working for millennial and gen-X'ers nowadays. We're the ones who were hiding all our online lives (still) from our parents. I'm glad my Myspace was deleted to my teenage angst. Point being a lot of us I think are really respective of privacy and the fact that people (even teachers and nurses!) have lives that don't revolve around work.
Nice to see Gen X mentioned. In the several years, the media has mentioned only Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z. It’s like Gen X is the lost generation.
Well there's a decent chance you're going to be working for millennial and gen-X'ers nowadays. We're the ones who were hiding all our online lives (still) from our parents. I'm glad my Myspace was deleted to my teenage angst. Point being a lot of us I think are really respective of privacy and the fact that people (even teachers and nurses!) have lives that don't revolve around work.
Nice to see Gen X mentioned. In the several years, the media has mentioned only Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z. It’s like Gen X is the lost generation.
Apparently before the name "Generation X" stuck, one of the proposed names was "New Lost Generation".
Can someone explain Usenet to me? As I understand it, it's not a website. Is it something outside of the WWW? Does it have its own protocol or does it use HTTP? Do you need a dedicated client software for it, similar to IRC? How do/did you register to it? Is it paid? Who hosts it?
Others have covered what Usenet was. To further give you an idea of how different those times were, here is my email address from the signature on one of my Usenet posts from the '80s: ihnp4!{cithep,wlbr!callan}!tim What that meant was that to get an email to me, your computer should arrange to deliver it to ihnp4. That was the name of a machine at a Bell Labs office at a place named "Indian Hill" in Naperville, IL.…
Re: "different times", VAX sysadmins in those days of "bang-bang" addresses were like telegraph offices. We didn't yet have what we called "glass teletypes", so we would "post" to a newsgroup by writing the post on paper and posting it in the sysadmin's inbox (an actual box). He would type it in sometime during the day, and our leased-line connection would exchange messages with MIT several times a day. Each morning, the sysadmin would print out the previous day's postings in each of the several newsgroups we followed. One stack of fan-fold, green-striped lineprinter paper for each newsgroup that we cared about (maybe 4-6). During the day, we would pass the "newsgroup" around the office like a daily newspaper.
Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.
Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.
I am running it through a certain set of filters. From my SEO days I recalled that new websites are often penalized based on the certain keywords in search engines. Considering this is a new site, and there is 300 million plus posts and I am not able to read and moderate it, this is the best way I know of to deal with it. But perhaps you're right and I should get rid of it. I'll think about it. This is a valid comment.
Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.
For future historians, the post is about the sex act known as the “dirty sanchez”.
> For that example, it's at least fairly obvious why it was censored. Actually, it's not that obvious. It censored "Dirty Sanchez". I'm thinking it thought it was a person's name, and censored it for privacy reasons? > Keeping the p e(s) full seems to I suppose "pipe" can have an offensive/sexual connotation. Even if it doesn't so much today, perhaps it did back then.
My guess is that they just used a fairly large word list, which contained a bunch of euphomisms like Dirty Sanchez.
Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.
Why are many words censored? To take a completely random example (I just took one with many asterisks) where it makes the post completely illegible: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.sexuality.gen... For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material! Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.
Sigh. Whatever it says about you that the first place you looked was soc.sexuality.general, it is even more saddening that I knew all the words which had been redacted.
Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.
There's weird gaps where groups have some posts from a given date but not all of the posts (e.g. I know I posted to csm.hypercard on 24 April 1990 and can see it in Google's dejanews cache, but not in this cache which has other posts to the group on that date). Was it just luck of the draw from what was cut to tape? How do you handle cross posting?
I am still in the process of moving posts to the online DB.