I first posted on Usenet in 1995.. I am OG
No, you're not even close.
USENET rises again?
131–140 of 235 posts
Re: USENET rises again?
#132I still am on USENET since the 90s. Although I love it for its simplicity, its protocol was conceived when the Internet was almost exclusively populated by educated people. As a result, it has no antibodies against trolls and spammers and can be exploited very easily. I believe we'd have no other choice than to extend the NNTP protocol with some form of protection against that, otherwise as soon as a group attracts a number of people, it will immediately be targeted by spammers, scammers and trolls.
Re: USENET rises again?
#133As a programmer of over 30 years I still have never used Usenet and the reason is the barrier to entry. There is way too much friction. You need a paid (!) subscription to a provider, potentially a subscription to an indexer, plus client software. All of this to access what is essentially a pure text forum. Frankly I am not interested in jumping through hoops to access something which an "average person" would have n…
In the olden times your ISP usually included it like they did with email, the instructions for my old isp still exists though I doubt the news server does
Re: USENET rises again?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a few people in my killfile so that I don't see messages from them but don't get much spam in the comp.* groups that I read. The threading and only seeing new messages is a lot better in my Usenet client than any web forum that I use, including this one.
"Including this one" is a good example, for how the rules of how content is selected for presentation define the medium. Even with exactly the same people, exactly the same dang occasionally nudging people this way or that way, this place would be an entirely different if the effective feed composition wasn't the one it is. So much of the identity of these online communities is an emergent consequence of the mechanis…
i notice that a forum for a productive effort gets much less useful if there is a "general" sub form. It seems to ruin organization permanently.
One could in stead have a "i don't know where to put this" section that forces the mod to move or delete it.
Re: USENET rises again?
#135I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers, etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary forums. I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.m…
> sign up for a free Usenet provider Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one.
Re: USENET rises again?
#136Simple moderation of a newsgroup on Usenet approximated running a mail list: known users (like list subscribers) could post anything to the newsgroup, while messages from unknown users would be diverted into something like a mail spool,
and, if approved by a moderator, would be posted to the newsgroup. A moderator
could add or remove users (email addresses) from the known users list. Complaints about known user posting behavior could be directed to a moderator,
who might or might not take action. Multiple moderators are possible, see the "STUMP" software mentioned in the Reg article.
Attempts to "retro-moderate" previously posted messages by using the NNTP cancel mechanism were only widely effective in the very early 1980s, and rapidly became problematic due to disagreements, forgery, and vandalism.
source: Hosted a moderated newsgroups FAQ for decades, helped convert news.newusers.questions to a moderated group - which may have been a case of "we had to destroy the village to save it" :-(
Re: USENET rises again?
#137I was in an AI conference yesterday, and there was a bunch of discussion in the chat about Slack channels, Discord servers, etc. So I was literally just lamenting the state of shared discussion forums, and commented that we all need to go back to Usenet and drop all these lame "walled garden" proprietary forums. I'd like to tell people "install Thunderbird, sign up for a free Usenet provider, and join comp.ai, comp.m…
sign up for a free Usenet provider Any suggestions?
The free "10 GB" trial accounts available from usenet binaries providers can serve as a text only read/posting account for years. Like with usenet.farm
Re: USENET rises again?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sign up for a free Usenet provider Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one.
Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one. It's been a while since I looked. I could have sworn there were at least a handful, but either A. I might be mis-remembering or B. the landscape might have changed since I checked last. That said, there seem to be quite few who offer cheap if not actually free access. And by "cheap" I mean, on the order of $10.00…
I don't think 10USD/month for access to a forum is anywhere near cheap or even reasonable, no matter how big it is. I can't imagine anyone paying that for non-warez Usenet access.
Re: USENET rises again?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sign up for a free Usenet provider Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one.
Sorry, but you make it sound like there are many. That allow posting, and free, I think I only know one. It's been a while since I looked. I could have sworn there were at least a handful, but either A. I might be mis-remembering or B. the landscape might have changed since I checked last. That said, there seem to be quite few who offer cheap if not actually free access. And by "cheap" I mean, on the order of $10.00…
That seems rather expensive given the service being provided, i.e. read-write access to a text-only discussion board. Where's all the cost going?
Re: USENET rises again?
#140I first posted on Usenet in 1995.. I am OG
a couple years after AOL came online and... well changed it quite a bit.