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Usenet Archives
- ksherlock 6mo agoif nothing else, it's much more usable than the google news archives.
- DamonHD 6mo agoSeems 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...
- greygood 6mo agocensored
- kseistrup 6mo ago/me is still running an NNTP server…
- davidwritesbugs 6mo agohmmm, interesting. .... address? Can I get an account?
- kseistrup 6mo agoI'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 6mo agoDoes 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.
- cykros 6mo agohttps://eternal-september.org/ https://eternal-september.org/ Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).
- inopinatus 6mo agoMe 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?
- turblety 6mo agoIt's so disappointing that we could have had Usenet, but instead have centralised/corporate/ad/spyware invested Facebook/Reddit/Xitter/Tiktok.
- cykros 6mo agohttps://eternal-september.org/ 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.
- sumtechguy 6mo agospam 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.
- cmacleod4 6mo agoSpam fell off drastically after Google Groups disconnected from Usenet a couple of years ago.
- tptacek 6mo agoBinaries killed Usenet, not spam.
- jghn 6mo agoLittle 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
- cowmix 6mo agoUsenet 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. Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
- DamonHD 6mo agoSimilar! 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!
- tptacek 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoit 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 6mo agoMy 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.
- 6mo ago
- onion2k 6mo agoUsenet 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.
- cmacleod4 6mo agoI 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 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 6mo agoWhere 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 6mo agoAs 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:comp.lang.tcl&t=0&p=1 https://usenetarchives.com/index.php?s=deadlock%20ingroup:co... then select "Content", unselect "Author" and "Subject" and click "Search".
- commandlinefan 6mo ago> it seems greatly improved With 1990's style age "verification" to boot.
- alexkkoo93 6mo agohow much coffee does my guy need lol. Can't read a page without a request for additional caffeine
- commandlinefan 6mo agoA 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 6mo agoIf you don't need binaries, eternal-september.org isn't too shabby.
- kls0e 6mo agoimpressive, thank you.
- OhMeadhbh 6mo agoweird, 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.
- cbull 6mo agoI found a few of my old posts from 1997
- kseistrup 6mo agoI easily found one from 1999: https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=dk.edb.programmering.java&mid=PDdiM3VvZSRtaWUkMUBuZXdzLmN5YmVyY2l0eS5kaz4 https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=dk.edb.programmering....
- emmelaich 6mo agoI found some of mine from 1992
- commandlinefan 6mo agocomp.lang.java seems to go all the way back to 1995. Maybe depends on the group?
- myself248 6mo agoHuh, where is alt.2600?
- convolvatron 6mo agosadly 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 6mo agoDang. 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?
- convolvatron 6mo agomy data source? I ran a data center in the 80s, including nntp distribution and archiving as was the general practice back then. so, just personal opinion I guess.
- nobleach 6mo agoIt'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 6mo agoIt's used for piracy a lot still.
- nobleach 6mo agoYup, 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 6mo agothe alt.devilbunnies vs alt.pave.the.earth "wars" kept me sane as a teenager. I miss the old internet.
- ern_ave 6mo agoI 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.
- shawn_w 6mo agoDevilbunnies? 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.
- devilbunny 6mo ago
- mghackerlady 6mo agoUsenet 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 6mo agoThis is what the internet used to be about, just people ... connecting with people, without all the hassle of big business in the way.
- jmclnx 6mo agoThe site wants my birthday, so I guess I will not be visiting it :(
- SoftTalker 6mo agoJust make one up?
- godshatter 6mo agoSo give it someone else's birthday instead.
- mfro 6mo agoDoes 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.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoOther than the nicer UX, is this different than the large archive in groups.google.com ?
- e40 6mo agoGoogle 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 6mo agoEspecially 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...
- ChrisMarshallNY 6mo agoI am thrilled to announce that none of my old UseNet stuff seems to be there. <whew />
- cbull 6mo agoI found a few of my posts from 1997, am glad none of them were too cringe.
- Hizonner 6mo agoFuck I sounded so fucking pompous in 1984. I mean fuck.
- kjs3 6mo agoWe all did.
- Our_Benefactors 6mo agoUsenet 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.
- rendx 6mo agoIs there an easy way to grab messages/threads? I would like a copy of my own posts.
- ksherlock 6mo agoarchive.org has usenet archives (in gzipped mbox format). Not exactly an "easy way" if you want threads, of course.
- kogasa240p 6mo agoVery 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.
- ben_pfaff 6mo agoI 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.
- tappaseater 6mo agone.general, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, meowww wars, Stephen Boursey. Anyone else old?