4 ms·

I wonder if this isn't already covered by archive.org ... (And if not, why not? They collect so many other things.)

by vog 10y ago

yaakov34 10y ago
Norman Yarvin's contribution is to pull these good articles out of years of discussions which he followed, usually taking them out of threads with many comments and varying subjects, and to present them sorted by subject matter. It would take a huge amount of effort to duplicate that. Sure, you could find these articles with a search on some archive, but they would be found among thousands of hits of, putting it very mildly, rather lower value. Yarchive is a very valuable site.
guard-of-terra 10y ago
Usenet archives used to be covered by Google Groups, I assume they dropped it when being good was no longer paramount.
- grkvlt 10y ago
  No, Groups still contains USENET archives, ported from the DejaNews acquisition, I believe. I have searched for my earliest posts as a first year undergraduate in 1991 and they are all there, for instance.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    That's very good to hear. It pains me to not being able to access archives.
    - grkvlt 10y ago
      FYI, the URLs for USENET look like this, with the name of the group you want substituted for 'alt.silly-group.radish-therapy' which is an alternative hierarchy group I proposed, that was created in 1992 and is still ... going, at least, in some sense of the word: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.silly-group.radish-therapy https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.silly-group.radi...
- quirkafleeg 10y ago
  Pretty sad that your post was downvoted, since while Google haven't dropped Usenet entirely (I wish they would, and hand it to someone who gives a shit about it), they have gone out of their way to make a once useful service as unusable as possible. Go to groups.google.com in the early days and you got the Usenet archive. Go now (and for many years), and you get this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview Where's the Usenet archive there? Furthermore, Google is a significant reason why many people deserted Usenet over the last decade or so, as it provided via Google Groups a gateway for posts that were almost exclusively troll, abuse or spam (or, at best, clueless Googlers (like AOLers of the past) who didn't know they were posting to Usenet, or what Usenet is) and Google completely ignored pleas by people in the Usenet community to stop the abuse. Edit: Funny, after making this post, after trying to find (via Google) examples I knew of people on Usenet complaining about Google, I now do another Google search and I'm greeted with a captcha, due to "unusual traffic from your computer network". I don't wanna get all conspiratorial, but it's still creepy as hell.
greglindahl 10y ago
archive.org has copies of the various Usenet archives, but doesn't have a specialized UI for viewing the data as threaded postings in groups.
toomuchtodo 10y ago
I've archived yarchive.net, and put it into archive.org with a note to someone to integrate it into the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if this isn't already covered by archive.org ... (And if not, why not? They collect so many other things.)

by vog 10y ago

I wonder if this isn't already covered by archive.org ... (And if not, why not? They collect so many other things.)

Norman Yarvin's contribution is to pull these good articles out of years of discussions which he followed, usually taking them out of threads with many comments and varying subjects, and to present them sorted by subject matter. It would take a huge amount of effort to duplicate that. Sure, you could find these articles with a search on some archive, but they would be found among thousands of hits of, putting it very mildly, rather lower value. Yarchive is a very valuable site.

guard-of-terra 10y ago

Usenet archives used to be covered by Google Groups, I assume they dropped it when being good was no longer paramount.

grkvlt 10y ago
No, Groups still contains USENET archives, ported from the DejaNews acquisition, I believe. I have searched for my earliest posts as a first year undergraduate in 1991 and they are all there, for instance.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  That's very good to hear. It pains me to not being able to access archives.
  - grkvlt 10y ago
    FYI, the URLs for USENET look like this, with the name of the group you want substituted for 'alt.silly-group.radish-therapy' which is an alternative hierarchy group I proposed, that was created in 1992 and is still ... going, at least, in some sense of the word: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.silly-group.radish-therapy https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.silly-group.radi...
quirkafleeg 10y ago
Pretty sad that your post was downvoted, since while Google haven't dropped Usenet entirely (I wish they would, and hand it to someone who gives a shit about it), they have gone out of their way to make a once useful service as unusable as possible. Go to groups.google.com in the early days and you got the Usenet archive. Go now (and for many years), and you get this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview Where's the Usenet archive there? Furthermore, Google is a significant reason why many people deserted Usenet over the last decade or so, as it provided via Google Groups a gateway for posts that were almost exclusively troll, abuse or spam (or, at best, clueless Googlers (like AOLers of the past) who didn't know they were posting to Usenet, or what Usenet is) and Google completely ignored pleas by people in the Usenet community to stop the abuse. Edit: Funny, after making this post, after trying to find (via Google) examples I knew of people on Usenet complaining about Google, I now do another Google search and I'm greeted with a captcha, due to "unusual traffic from your computer network". I don't wanna get all conspiratorial, but it's still creepy as hell.

greglindahl 10y ago

archive.org has copies of the various Usenet archives, but doesn't have a specialized UI for viewing the data as threaded postings in groups.

toomuchtodo 10y ago

I've archived yarchive.net, and put it into archive.org with a note to someone to integrate it into the Wayback Machine.