[HN Gopher] The geeks who saved Usenet (2002)
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The geeks who saved Usenet (2002)
 
Author : slyall
Score  : 35 points
Date   : 2021-03-16 04:56 UTC (18 hours ago)
 
web link (www.salon.com)
w3m dump (www.salon.com)
 
| dang wrote:
| One small past thread:
| 
|  _The geeks who saved Usenet (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811983 - July 2011 (7
| comments)
 
| buescher wrote:
| I don't miss cascades.
 
| chaimanmeow wrote:
| bring back rec.trolling and alt.flamewars
 
  | superkuh wrote:
  | Be the change you want to see. Usenet text groups are still
  | there. You can get posting access via https://www.eternal-
  | september.org/ now that most ISPs have dropped usenet over the
  | false 2004-2008 era scaremongering about it.
  | 
  | Come back to usenet. Life is good. There's still some spam but
  | it's honestly less than you get on any link aggregator on the
  | web these days.
 
    | EamonnMR wrote:
    | Is there a good writeup of how to do it and where to look for
    | active groups? I set up a reader on my sdf account a while
    | ago but I didn't end up finding much conversation.
 
  | iso1631 wrote:
  | alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
  | 
  | Always sounded hilarious (personally I loved Wes). Later found
  | out how much the anti-wesley feeling affected Wil Wheton
 
    | seniorThrowaway wrote:
    | That does suck for Will who was a child at the time. The
    | character is probably the most egregious Mary Sue of all time
    | though.
 
      | LukeShu wrote:
      | Was he really that bad for most if it though? If we ignore
      | the cluster of bad Wesley episodes that only happened
      | because of the 1988 writers' strike?
 
        | ghaff wrote:
        | Both TNG and DS9 had characters inserted to appeal to
        | younger audiences that were mostly annoying/irrelevant to
        | older ones. (DS9 at least had the excuse of being set on
        | a space station.) If the producers weren't thinking about
        | demographics, they wouldn't have been there. The original
        | series wasn't immune either.
 
        | LukeShu wrote:
        | Sure, there's playing demographics, and then there's
        | inserting "the most egregious Mary Sue of all time". I
        | don't think anyone considers Jake Sisko or Nog to be on
        | the level of Wesley Crusher.
 
        | Arrath wrote:
        | Yeah I would have to agree. Nog especially, most Mary
        | Sue's don't end up with prosthetics and PTSD.
 
        | ghaff wrote:
        | Not really. Although I could have generally lived with a
        | lower presence on DS9. (But it made at least more sense
        | in the context than TNG.)
 
  | spudlyo wrote:
  | Bring back Usenet Performance Art:
  | alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk.
  | 
  | See also The Meow Wars.[0]
  | 
  | [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars
 
| influx wrote:
| Thanks for killing Dejanews google. :(
 
| ghaff wrote:
| I haven't examined it but there's apparently a Usenet archive
| independent of Google at https://www.usenetarchives.com/
| 
| I assume things are also on the IA in some form.
| 
| Probably my earliest memory of Usenet (and really the Internet)
| is that after The Empire Strikes Back, there were endless posts
| on, I think, rec.arts.sflovers about whether [SPOILER :-)] Darth
| Vader was Luke's father. Someone at the AI Lab printed out the
| whole thread on the Lab's doubtless very expensive laser printer,
| bound it, and brought it into the movie committee office where I
| was hanging out a fair bit that summer
 
  | WalterGR wrote:
  | _Usenet archive independent of Google
  | athttps://www.usenetarchives.com/_
  | 
  | Their stats from https://www.usenetarchives.com/stats.php:
  | Documents / Posts: 16,032,489        Average Document: 3.71 KB
  | Storage Size: 56.76 GB (7.75%)        Stats Collected: Mar 16,
  | 2021, 17:34 EST
  | 
  | The article says that Google had archived _700 million_ posts.
 
    | escape_goat wrote:
    | That archive appears to be in the middle of a database
    | migration, so it's possible that this deficiency is
    | temporary. It is (as of last report) actually a single-
    | developer project that just launched in January, apparently
    | with enough pull to get a shout-out from VICE's
    | "Motherboard". The current privacy policy reserves the right
    | do basically whatever they want with your usage data.
 
      | WalterGR wrote:
      | _That archive appears to be in the middle of a database
      | migration, so it 's possible that this deficiency is
      | temporary._
      | 
      | I guess as of ~6 months ago the archive weighed in at 300
      | GB and 300 million posts, so hopefully temporary: https://w
      | ww.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/in6u06/free_usenet_...
      | 
      |  _as of last report_
      | 
      | Where does one find the reports? Here are the creator's
      | posts to Reddit, at least:
      | https://www.reddit.com/user/emolinare/submitted/
 
    | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
    | At that size, it is feasible to download to a laptop
    | computer. If it was made available for download, it would
    | greatly increase the odds of it surviving as there would not
    | be a single point of failure.
 
      | WalterGR wrote:
      | Cursory googling suggests that there's no single, kind of
      | 'master' backup available. What seems to be downloadable
      | are various (apparently thousands of separate) archives
      | from Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/usenet and
      | https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical
      | 
      | It would take a ton of work to combine them for sure, but I
      | absolutely agree it's important.
 
        | mattowen_uk wrote:
        | Every message should have in it's header:
        | 1. A unique message ID            2. The ID of the parent
        | message            3. The group it was posted to
        | 4. The subject line            5. The authors email and
        | name             6. the date/time of posting
        | 
        | So rebuilding a single repository of linked messages is
        | TOTALLY do-able, and mostly programmatically to boot.
 
| mellosouls wrote:
| Ironically, Salon learned nothing from their own feature and its
| own discussion forum "TableTalk" was only narrowly saved by third
| parties (especially the Internet Archive) when they dumped it
| some years later.
| 
| Unfortunately, too late to save the quite brilliant
| _International Issues_ section, which had been arrogantly deleted
| without notice years before presumably because it was deemed
| "foreign" as well as being a cost-sink.
| 
| It housed some of the most brilliant discussions I've ever read
| online, now mostly lost forever afaik.
| 
| Strangely, Salon's own incompetence and lack of concern for
| guardianship is completely missing from the article.
| 
| https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-tabletalk-panic
 
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