Earlier quoted context omitted.
NNTP is a standard. I use eternal-september.
I joined a couple of years back, but came away disappointed. All the groups I followed 20 years back are pale shadows of their former selves, filled with spam. And most of those were big in the day and included the comp.lang.c|c++ and a few of the comp.os groups. There's still a need for usenet, and I'd love to participate if there was anyone worth talking to. But it needs fixing first.
Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
161–170 of 199 posts
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#162If that group was relying on Google, that's on them at this point. If you use any Google product, you better have an alternative ready. There's no telling when Google will either shut the product down, or just ban you.
They don't. It's a Usenet group. Google bought Dejanews and was an acceptable Usenet archive, for a time. Then Google put the Usenet groups under the same umbrella as their proprietary groups. Then their index became spotty (and you could retrieve some posts under groups.google.com, but not groups.google.de, or vice versa). Today, Google Groups is near useless for Usenet.
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#163Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is hilarious. I could see something similar happening on HN today.
Dang et al would never let it happen.
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno. History matters and historians would probably strongly disagree. Some things are more important than you think. Too much gets lost too easily.
Not everything is deserving of being treated as historical artifacts worthy of retention. A friend has lamented that when he was in college in the late 80s, he used USENET as a way to connect with people and work through some pretty heavy emotional challenges. Retaining his personal struggles is hardly "history" - if anything, the historical value of retaining the struggles of one inconsequential person is far lower…
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno. History matters and historians would probably strongly disagree. Some things are more important than you think. Too much gets lost too easily.
Not everything is deserving of being treated as historical artifacts worthy of retention. A friend has lamented that when he was in college in the late 80s, he used USENET as a way to connect with people and work through some pretty heavy emotional challenges. Retaining his personal struggles is hardly "history" - if anything, the historical value of retaining the struggles of one inconsequential person is far lower…
It is something that I've thought about - the contradiction between privacy and the need to communicate yourself to the generations to come and the broadcast into the void it requires. If your friend is okay with his privacy in the archives, he might be glad to know that in hundred years, there will be an AI whose PHD will be on the emotional significance of new technologies in the lives of early adopters of the Internet, the case of user John Smith 1988.
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#167Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " ... complete archive of ... Usenet " sotto voce > Usenet postings were never meant to be permanent. I was there in its heyday and nobody expected their postings to live beyond the spool expiration lifetime.
It took years but all of my old Usenet posts eventually were removed. The people running archives tended to be real jerks about it - I’m pretty sure a couple of them got off on telling me no with long hand typed explanations, but in the end most of them were running archives on their employer’s equipment and when they switched jobs, got let go, or retired they couldn’t take it with them and nobody else wanted to main…
I'm amazed anyone gave you the time if day. I can't imagine I'd have even answered. I certainly never signed any kind of copyright agreement when I started posting on BBS's or newsgroups.
Somewhere on one or more old hard drives somewhere I may have a few years of whatever groups I was into at the time, and I tell you now, on this new similar public forum, I will not bother digging out and scanning all my old drives to find anything to remove it, and I will not promise never to add them to any public archive.
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dang et al would never let it happen.
Personal attacks are not cool on HN. We ban accounts that post like that. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it again.
If it’s not clear I was saying bannable speech and such would not be tolerated here because of the good moderation.
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#170Excuse my ignorance but was comp.lang.c active? Is any of Usenet still active? I haven't used it in like 20 years and wouldn't even know which NNTP host to connect to.
As for NNTP access: eternal-september.org might be an option, but there are still quite a few NNTP servers ticking with open registration.