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nobleach 1 days ago [-]
It'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 always assumed would eventually happen. The group names alone are truly unhinged. The Wild West is still.... wild!
b8 1 days ago [-]
It's used for piracy a lot still.
nobleach 1 days ago [-]
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.
FuriouslyAdrift 1 days ago [-]
the alt.devilbunnies vs alt.pave.the.earth "wars" kept me sane as a teenager. I miss the old internet.
shawn_w 22 hours ago [-]
Devilbunnies? Man, I haven't heard that name in a long long time. I used to be obsessed with reading all the stories in that universe. Never contributed anything though.
ern_ave 1 days ago [-]
I remember the epic flame wars with a certain game developer (who I wont name so as not to create drama here) whose starship simulator had a few bugs.
cowmix 2 days ago [-]
Usenet 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.
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 killed Usenet.
(I loved Usenet, but also: good riddance.)
kjs3 1 days ago [-]
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'.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
My experience in the 1990s was that that was a very excellent way to get all the Usenet users in your userbase to switch to some other ISP, which in turn meant there was little reason to waste all the energy on Usenet if you were going to do that, which contributed to the centralization of Usenet, a system that did not make sense once centralized and that subsequently collapsed into a shitty P2P piracy network.
kjs3 9 hours ago [-]
I suppose I should be happy you didn't make out like we caused cancer and premature hair loss.
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
The people who ran partial-feed Usenet services? I think they're the actual heroes of the story, aren't they?
DamonHD 2 days ago [-]
Similar! And for a while my back bedroom in London was one of the world's top USENET 'transit' nodes, getting as high as ~#6 IIRC!
cmacleod4 2 days ago [-]
I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.
mfro 1 days ago [-]
Where are you seeing full-text search for groups? I can filter the post titles on the current page of listings, but this is completely useles...
cmacleod4 1 days ago [-]
As I said, the user interface is awkward. You need to select the "Content" checkbox when searching for Posts. E.g. to search for "deadlock" within comp.lang.tcl, start with https://usenetarchives.com/index.php?s=deadlock%20ingroup:co...
then select "Content", unselect "Author" and "Subject" and click "Search".
commandlinefan 1 days ago [-]
> it seems greatly improved
With 1990's style age "verification" to boot.
mghackerlady 1 days ago [-]
Usenet archives have helped me tremendously. For example, I'm looking for info on an old (non-xenix) Unix for the apple Lisa and it gave me a name (and after a bit of digging, an address) of someone who was trusted with the remaining stock after the company that made it went under
b112 1 days ago [-]
This is what the internet used to be about, just people ... connecting with people, without all the hassle of big business in the way.
ChrisMarshallNY 1 days ago [-]
I am thrilled to announce that none of my old UseNet stuff seems to be there.
<whew />
cbull 1 days ago [-]
I found a few of my posts from 1997, am glad none of them were too cringe.
onion2k 2 days ago [-]
Usenet was great in the late 90s and early 2000s. I posted a lot, and met some great people. I got a job doing tech review of books about WAP and WML from my posts in a group about the forerunner to mobile internet, and another job with a company making intranet software from some posts about ASP and vbscript. I've no idea where I'd go for that sort of forum today.
ben_pfaff 18 hours ago [-]
I spent over a decade posting so much to comp.lang.c. I've run into a few regulars there in my work since then. I suppose it's still ticking along but I haven't visited in almost 20 years.
turblety 2 days ago [-]
It's so disappointing that we could have had Usenet, but instead have centralised/corporate/ad/spyware invested Facebook/Reddit/Xitter/Tiktok.
sumtechguy 1 days ago [-]
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 here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.
Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.
BeetleB 1 days ago [-]
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.
cmacleod4 1 days ago [-]
Spam fell off drastically after Google Groups disconnected from Usenet a couple of years ago.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Binaries killed Usenet, not spam.
jghn 1 days ago [-]
Little bit of both. From my own anecdata, most people I knew left usenet due to spam problems. Most of the people who did not were primarily the ones using it for binaries. And then yes, the binary angle started the trend where ISPs stopped offering it altogether, which even further reduced the likelihood that people would use it.
And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries
DamonHD 7 hours ago [-]
I had to selectively stop carrying parts of USENET (I ran what was briefly a fairly important node globally) because of the volume of the binaries, and various sex and bestiality groups (probably still including some badly-scanned ASCII-rendered images!
CookieTonsure 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cykros 2 days ago [-]
https://eternal-september.org/ last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
cmacleod4 1 days ago [-]
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Usenet is a system so bad that "posting a message on a Usenet server and having it appear on other servers in a few seconds" sounds like an achievement. And: both those other systems have reliable ways to see all the new messages on a thread, unlike Usenet, which couldn't even guarantee that you'd see all the messages, let alone in order.
I was a Usenet systems engineer (regional ISP operator, INN hacker) during the heyday of Usenet, and a dedicated user in that time as well. These rose-tinted views of how well Usenet worked don't fly for me at all. Reddit is actively, materially, multifariously better than Usenet, and Reddit is not the state of the art.
Hizonner 1 days ago [-]
> Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds.
To be fair, that's probably because it's now a lot more centralized than it was intended to be.
ksherlock 2 days ago [-]
if nothing else, it's much more usable than the google news archives.
DamonHD 2 days ago [-]
Seems to have patchy coverage in the places I was looking, and date range search wasn't working for me. OTOH, I think I found some posts not archived by Google...
myself248 1 days ago [-]
Huh, where is alt.2600?
convolvatron 1 days ago [-]
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.
myself248 9 hours ago [-]
Dang. I had previously gone back and found some old posts I remember, I believe it was through Dejanews, so theoretically they exist out there. What's your data source?
kseistrup 2 days ago [-]
/me is still running an NNTP server…
inopinatus 1 days ago [-]
Me too, but not for usenet. The server-to-server protocol is a low ceremony, high observability, standardised and battle-proven gossip-flood protocol with hierarchical channelisation and robust mature tooling, ideal for eventually-consistent distribution of telemetry and control messages over a node mesh of uncertain reliability up to global scale. What's not to like?
davidwritesbugs 2 days ago [-]
hmmm, interesting. .... address? Can I get an account?
Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).
kseistrup 2 days ago [-]
I'm sorry, it's only for people I know personally. Also, it only holds minor Usenet hierarchies like the vestigial dk.*.
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
Does anything happen in the dk. hierarchy anymore. Last time I check, probably 10 years ago, it was either spam or one crazy person.
It's a bit of a shame, I really want something like dk.city.copenhagen and dk.city.copenhagen.noerrebro to replace Facebook groups. That's probably never going to happen, it's seems like a missed opportunity.
OhMeadhbh 1 days ago [-]
weird, 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.
comp.lang.java seems to go all the way back to 1995. Maybe depends on the group?
mfro 1 days ago [-]
Does anyone know if this is still the most comprehensive archive? I'd like to know if the owner found any of the missing 91-01 datasets or if they are available anywhere.
rendx 1 days ago [-]
Is there an easy way to grab messages/threads? I would like a copy of my own posts.
ksherlock 1 days ago [-]
archive.org has usenet archives (in gzipped mbox format). Not exactly an "easy way" if you want threads, of course.
alexkkoo93 2 days ago [-]
how much coffee does my guy need lol. Can't read a page without a request for additional caffeine
commandlinefan 1 days ago [-]
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)
ksherlock 1 days ago [-]
If you don't need binaries, eternal-september.org isn't too shabby.
Our_Benefactors 1 days ago [-]
Usenet must be a generational thing, because it was not widely available or used when I was in university. We were all concerned with if we were allowed to torrent content and how strict they were with enforcement. I recall friends on some campuses had very strict policies where two strikes could mean you had no internet service in the dormitory for the remainder of the year.
ChrisArchitect 1 days ago [-]
Other than the nicer UX, is this different than the large archive in groups.google.com ?
e40 1 days ago [-]
Google has had memory loss. I was on usenet in the early 80's and when Google took over, I had fun reviewing my posts. Probably 10 years ago (more or less), I did the search again and the earliest post was sometime in the 90's. Very sad that they lost all those posts (not just of mine, but surely there are many more they lost).
EDIT: and in this specific archive, the earliest post of mine is 2003!
Hizonner 1 days ago [-]
Especially annoying because if I remember correctly people gave Google some irreplaceable backup tapes on the promise that there'd be a complete archive, and within a couple of years it'd turned into Google Groups...
Hizonner 1 days ago [-]
Fuck I sounded so fucking pompous in 1984. I mean fuck.
kjs3 1 days ago [-]
We all did.
kls0e 2 days ago [-]
impressive, thank you.
kogasa240p 1 days ago [-]
Very 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.
greygood 2 days ago [-]
censored
jmclnx 1 days ago [-]
The site wants my birthday, so I guess I will not be visiting it :(
Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I always assumed would eventually happen. The group names alone are truly unhinged. The Wild West is still.... wild!
Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
(I loved Usenet, but also: good riddance.)
Which is why most of us stopped carrying the binary hierarchy[1] way, way before Usenet 'died'.
With 1990's style age "verification" to boot.
<whew />
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 here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.
Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.
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.
And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
I was a Usenet systems engineer (regional ISP operator, INN hacker) during the heyday of Usenet, and a dedicated user in that time as well. These rose-tinted views of how well Usenet worked don't fly for me at all. Reddit is actively, materially, multifariously better than Usenet, and Reddit is not the state of the art.
To be fair, that's probably because it's now a lot more centralized than it was intended to be.
Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
It's a bit of a shame, I really want something like dk.city.copenhagen and dk.city.copenhagen.noerrebro to replace Facebook groups. That's probably never going to happen, it's seems like a missed opportunity.
But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.
https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=dk.edb.programmering....
EDIT: and in this specific archive, the earliest post of mine is 2003!