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

Post by AMerrit » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

surround wrote: post #230

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…

I remember reading about a game developer who was a big time troll/flamer on Usenet for years, and who’s Wikipedia Talk page got so out of hand it had to be courtesy blanked and edit-protected at the highest level. Does anybody remember who this is? I can’t find him, despite my efforts searching for what I just described.

Post by msla » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

lixtra wrote: post #248

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.

How do you deal with the (European) right to be forgotten? On one hand it’s nice that we can see all this old data. On the other hand, as far as I remember in the 90s you typically subscribed to a newsgroup and only then got recent posts. So the expectations was a limited life time of the post. Of course it would still be stored in thousands of readers. Obviously the copyright of each post is with the author. You jus…

Post by jozefjarosciak » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

pmachinery wrote: post #196

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should definitely get rid of whatever is being used currently. The first group I randomly clicked (alt.alien.visitors) was censoring the word "public" (and "sucks" and "pipe"), multiple times in the same post which, if it happens a lot, especially on innocuous words, is really going to spoil what is an excellent project. Its not a bad idea to filter content though, and/or have a flag button on threads/posts. 300…

Post by ape4 » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #18

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?

Post by int_10h » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #242

bakul wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:-)

I've decided to remove bad word filtering and all other censoring. Let's see how it goes.