I see a lot of people throwing out Usenet as an option, and I wonder, did anyone here ever have to admin a Usenet node? It's a huge pain in the ass. First off

I see a lot of people throwing out Usenet as an option, and I wonder, did anyone here ever have to admin a Usenet node? It's a huge pain in the ass. First off, the storage requirements are both unlimited and unpredictable. Someone might post some huge files to a group, and all of a sudden your server disk is full. You could set your server to drop large messages or attachments, but then you didn't have the complete message. Then there was spam. Everyone had to do their own spam filtering. Or ... pay an upstream provider to do it for you. In which case they're basically the centralized solution. The reason Internet forums took off was because it was way easier to let one central group manager the spam and load and network and disk and.... instead of everyone doing it themselves.