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2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

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Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#231

Post by microtherion »

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

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.

It's great that your service comes into existence at all, and if you set up an opencollective or patreon account, I'd gladly contribute to the operating costs.

As it exists right now, there are some glaring omissions. I would imagine that showing authors in the search results next to the titles would not be prohibitively difficult.

Proper threading of posts would probably be considerably harder, but would provide immense value IMHO.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#232

Post by gravitas »

thimkerbell wrote: post #150
gravitas wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Is 2003 a hard limit to how far back was captured, or just a current point in the import? I was looking to comp.os.linux.* groups from a bit earlier than that, a lot of the 90s. Thanks again :)

People, once you get to a newsgroup, click on 'all years' to see which years are in the archive, and select which year you want. Don't expect posts from last millennium to be present, at least not yet.

At the time of my comment, 2003 was the oldest year present for the group(s) i mentioned. I searched for a FAQ before posting, it's not clearly marked "imports are still in progress". Please don't be condescending, OP specifically stated "ask me questions." You are not OP.

Edit: I am now on a desktop, and confirm it's not a mobile glitch; the archives for comp.os.linux are imported back to 2003 only at this time. https://www.usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.os.linux&...

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#233

Post by bregma »

gimboland wrote: post #215
chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

Anyone else remember alt.sex.cost-benefits-accounting ? I swear it existed (around 1995?) but I've never been able to find any evidence for it.

If I recall correctly it was created at the same time as alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat and alt.sex.tonya.harding.spank.spank.spank, but I'm old and could be misremembering.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#234

Post by encom »

chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

groups.google.com seems to require a Google account for access. Sad.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#236

Post by bregma »

x87678r wrote: post #107

For you youngun's if you wanted "pictures" you'd have to go to alt.porn.*, choose an interesting title, get a bunch of posts with text data (wait for them to download), cut and paste them into a single text file then uudecode it to a JPEG of something that hopefully will match the title.

It was easier to just use archie and have the uue files delivered to your mailbox.

You could use the same system to get software: I eventually got an entire GNU development system for my Atari ST from umich via archie. Usenet would have index updates broadcast so you knew when to download new files.

Also, the clarity of those Spectrum 512 files. You could almost see the texture of the skin.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#237

Post by m463 »

gimboland wrote: post #215
chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

Anyone else remember alt.sex.cost-benefits-accounting ? I swear it existed (around 1995?) but I've never been able to find any evidence for it.

maybe someone on alt.sex.wizards would recall

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#239

Post by m463 »

aaron695 wrote: post #172

This is pretty unethical by what normal HN standards are around privacy. This is a bit like as a teenager going to a meeting in the 80's, having it recorded without you knowing and now it being on online. There was no expectations usenet would be stored or be searchable back then.

I disagree, it was sort of public

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#240

Post by ajnin »

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #154
throwaway89201 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commen…

Since you seem intent on being a reference usenet archive I think it's important to preserve the integrity of the original material. Moderating posts 20 or 30 years after the fact seems ill advised. If you modify the content in any way, at least put a prominent notice so that people don't get confused by the website name.

Also, it seems that your parsing process strips headers and that you don't keep the raw messages, however I remember that on some newsgroups people used to pass secret messages in headers that only those "in the know" would look for, it would be a shame to lose that. Access to posts in raw format would be nice in this scenario.

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