3 ms·

Dejanews built that frontend on top of an archive they had. Google bought Dejanews and thus the archive.

by jghn 4y ago

iso1631 4y ago
Google really destroyed that archive, there's posts from the 80s and 90s I know used to be in deja and in early google that just can't be found any more.
- btrettel 4y ago
  And it seems that a lot of uuencoded content was removed at some point. You can see the text of the message, but the uuencoded part is mostly cut out. Here's an example: https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/m/VethbajH648J https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/... If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that message, I'd be interested.
  - that_courtney 4y ago
    You can't. It was never there. I wrote the first custom NNTP client for Deja. (This was a high-performance replacement for the community, open source client.) All it did was receive and dump articles in a format for the indexer. It did some light processing, including stripping uuencode content. So uuencode never even made it into the archive.
    - btrettel 4y ago
      Thanks for the information. I figured someone here might know something.
- quokka 4y ago
  Agreed. I posted a lot in the 90s, especially to groups like sci.math and rec.arts.books.tolkien, and there is almost no trace of any of it in Google groups. When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was good, because Google was good at search and I naively still believed that the company actually wanted to make all information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the old Usenet stuff is gone.
- jghn 4y ago
  To be honest a lot of what I posted back then I'm happy has been lost to the sands of time. I will say one thing I've found strange is how spotty old posts are. Even within the same newsgroup. I can easily track down old posts of mine but sometimes stuff is spotty within a single thread. I've not seen any true rhyme or reason to what's gone and what remains.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  The final nail in Usenet's coffin was the removal of the discussion filter from Google searches in 2014. Before that, people could use that filter to easily find others talking about something, but apparently that didn't please advertisers who wanted users to find only companies selling that something, so Google removed that filter and problem solved. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-18854.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1... https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-search/ https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-sea...

Dejanews built that frontend on top of an archive they had. Google bought Dejanews and thus the archive.

by jghn 4y ago

Dejanews built that frontend on top of an archive they had. Google bought Dejanews and thus the archive.

Google really destroyed that archive, there's posts from the 80s and 90s I know used to be in deja and in early google that just can't be found any more.

btrettel 4y ago
And it seems that a lot of uuencoded content was removed at some point. You can see the text of the message, but the uuencoded part is mostly cut out. Here's an example: https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/m/VethbajH648J https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/... If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that message, I'd be interested.
- that_courtney 4y ago
  You can't. It was never there. I wrote the first custom NNTP client for Deja. (This was a high-performance replacement for the community, open source client.) All it did was receive and dump articles in a format for the indexer. It did some light processing, including stripping uuencode content. So uuencode never even made it into the archive.
  - btrettel 4y ago
    Thanks for the information. I figured someone here might know something.
quokka 4y ago
Agreed. I posted a lot in the 90s, especially to groups like sci.math and rec.arts.books.tolkien, and there is almost no trace of any of it in Google groups. When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was good, because Google was good at search and I naively still believed that the company actually wanted to make all information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the old Usenet stuff is gone.
jghn 4y ago
To be honest a lot of what I posted back then I'm happy has been lost to the sands of time. I will say one thing I've found strange is how spotty old posts are. Even within the same newsgroup. I can easily track down old posts of mine but sometimes stuff is spotty within a single thread. I've not seen any true rhyme or reason to what's gone and what remains.
squarefoot 4y ago
The final nail in Usenet's coffin was the removal of the discussion filter from Google searches in 2014. Before that, people could use that filter to easily find others talking about something, but apparently that didn't please advertisers who wanted users to find only companies selling that something, so Google removed that filter and problem solved. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-18854.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1... https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-search/ https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-sea...