how much coffee does my guy need lol. Can't read a page without a request for additional caffeine
A good NNTP server is one of the few services I'd be willing to pay for on the modern internet, though. (Emphasis on good)
Usenet Archives
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Usenet Archives
#52It's so disappointing that we could have had Usenet, but instead have centralised/corporate/ad/spyware invested Facebook/Reddit/Xitter/Tiktok.
spam murdered it. It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough. Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive…
This.
I grew up with BBS access for a number of years, but no USENET access.
When I finally got access to USENET ... what a terrible place it was! SO MUCH SPAM.
And the few newsgroups not riddled with spam just had poor behavior. The nice thing about BBS conferences were they were all moderated. And the ones I was part of required you to use your real name (as verified by the BBS sysop). They took it seriously - if a sysop was found not to be compliant, his BBS was kicked out of the network for a period of time.
The only good thing about USENET was the tooling (news readers, etc). Otherwise, both early web forums and BBS's had it beat.
Re: Usenet Archives
#53Huh, where is alt.2600?
sadly the alts were a bit of a mixed bag. the root problem was that anyone could issue a control message to create a new alt group. which I verified personally. because of that intermediate nodes would choose not to download updates. partially because it was a cesspool, and largely because because bandwidth was quite limited and that's where all binaries were distributed. so alt groups had spotty distribution, which is reflected in the archives.
Re: Usenet Archives
#54It's always fun to realize that USENET is still out there humming along. I still remember the thrill of working on my ancient Delphi/Object Pascal projects, and posting questions... waiting a few hours and checking back for responses. There was no "instant gratification" in those days. (I wasn't really using IRC). Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I alway…
It's used for piracy a lot still.
Yup, in the 2005ish era, I found that I was downloading albums just because I could. Some I never even listened to! I got rid of my EasyNews subscription because it all seemed so silly to me.
Re: Usenet Archives
#55Is there an easy way to grab messages/threads? I would like a copy of my own posts.
Re: Usenet Archives
#56Very cool to see and play around with! Wonder if it'll have a small resurgence as http(s) continues to shit the bed with SEO slop and scrapers.
Re: Usenet Archives
#57Is there an easy way to grab messages/threads? I would like a copy of my own posts.
archive.org has usenet archives (in gzipped mbox format). Not exactly an "easy way" if you want threads, of course.
Re: Usenet Archives
#58how much coffee does my guy need lol. Can't read a page without a request for additional caffeine
A good NNTP server is one of the few services I'd be willing to pay for on the modern internet, though. (Emphasis on good)
If you don't need binaries, eternal-september.org isn't too shabby.
Re: Usenet Archives
#59weird, it seemed like the search index didn't go back past 2003. And then I tried a few more searches and found some hits. So I guess the index is a little spotty? But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.
I found a few of my old posts from 1997
Re: Usenet Archives
#60Usenet is the main reason I started my own ISP in ’93: to have a reliable USENET feed. I loved it then, and I love it now. Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
I ran the tech side of the most popular independent ISP in Chicago (I guess they were mostly all independent back then) in the mid-late 1990s, and Usenet was the biggest nightmare we had to deal with. We were solid at it, too (Freenix-ranked, independently worked out the INN history cache, &c). Nothing we did had more fussy hardware associated with it. The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what…
it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
Which is why most of us stopped carrying the binary hierarchy[1] way, way before Usenet 'died'.