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Usenet rewind archive search engine
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- rfarley04 23d agoOh my god this is a lifesaver. Just last week I was using Google Groups to search for old Usenet posts about the Commodore 64 and the Mimic Spartan, and I was getting "too many requests" errors 4 out of 5 times clicking a result. Happened on VPN+incognito, and in a separate browser. Just searched for what I was looking for in Rewind and immediately found the posts and even some I never saw in Google Groups results. So glad all of this is archived in multiple, non Google places
- imprint5 23d agoNot to be a party pooper but this is a paid service. I am sure there are reasons to pay but I bet their archive is the same as https://usenet.blueworldhosting.com https://usenet.blueworldhosting.com which is free. A free web frontend can be found at https://newsgrouper.org https://newsgrouper.org
- cstadler1869 23d agoIt has a free account has 25 full searches with advanced filtering etc.
- 1313ed01 23d agoDo those services have many more posts than what can be downloaded from archive.org and searched locally?
- zimpenfish 23d agoAlas, https://newsgrouper.org https://newsgrouper.org is not available from the UK (another casualty of the stupid OSA.)
- Animats 23d agoExpensive, too. $40/month.
- msephton 22d agoNewsgrouper is banned in UK for "safety concerns"
- cmacleod4 22d agoNewsgrouper is my site. It's not literally "banned", but after spending quite a bit of time studying the Online Safety Act and Ofcom's guidance, I concluded that it was just not practical to comply with its far-reaching requirements, and since I am in the UK I can't risk ignoring UK law.
- msephton 21d agoAh, the word used on the site is "Blocked" not "banned". Apologies. A shame that you decided to not support your own country. Imagine how much you could have done whilst explaining this issue!
- cmacleod4 22d agoI run newsgrouper.org as a hobby project. My architecture cannot support searching within article text, only by author, subject and/or date within one group at a time (or the set of groups you have subscribed to). Usenet-Rewind does support full-text search.
- ggm 23d agoThe most prolific self-references (to myself that is) I found were UUCP maps updates because I ran a node which was in the centrally coordinated catalog (iirc it drove honey-danber to convert a!b!c paths to user@c so you didn't have to hand-route) The second-most prolific self references were blovating across all and any groups I felt like. Nothing has changed.
- zimpenfish 23d ago> The second-most prolific self references were blovating across all and any groups I felt like. Nothing has changed. I can take the moral high ground here because my bloviating was at least in relevant groups. But still, bloody hell, younger me was (mostly) an idiot.
- ggm 22d agoI spent a bit of time haranguing Henry Spencer about why plywood was the perfect material to make satellites out of, in sci.space. I am not a materials scientist or a rocket scientist, and from memory he was the USENET admin at U Toronto department of Zoology, somehow uplifted to being the foremost space/rocketry name on USENET news. That pretty much sums up the zeitgeist.
- matherial 23d agoSelfishly, I hate these things. No one in the 1980s and early 1990s expected the internet to become what it did. I discovered it as a dumb teenager and posted some frankly idiotic stuff. I also put my real address and phone number in the signature, because that's how you rolled back then, the entire internet was like 10 nerds. Now, 35 years later, a lot of other stuff has mercifully decayed, but people keep bootstrapping these Usenet archives as pet projects every year, and there's never an option to opt out. Today, agents make it easier than ever to build a dossier on anyone you don't like, so this data is bound to cause some harm. And I guess when I die, the best-preserved memory of me that my grandchildren and grand-grandchildren will be able to pull up will be snarky posts from a 15-year-old on some unix-related discussion group. Yeah, I know there's a bunch of posts there that are of genuine historical interest. But I'm just not a fan and I don't mind burning karma to speak my mind.
- ssl-3 23d agoMan, I sure knew 35 years ago that whatever I shared in public was.... public. :) And some of it still is public from way back then -- including dumb and ugly comments, stupid flamewars, teenager stuff, and phone numbers. It doesn't bother me. I don't feel remorseful for having once been a kid and doing some of the dumb things that kids sometimes feel inclined to do, and those landline telephone numbers stopped being relevant to me decades ago.
- CalRobert 23d agoPublic or not 1991 was a very, very, very different time. The idea that some dumb stuff I posted would still be around in 30+ years would have been crazy. (Actually, I wonder if the Prodigy forums got archived...)
- Melatonic 22d agoThose were semi private no ? I would guess not. Although maybe there's an old server sitting in someone's garage with the info
- ChrisArchitect 23d agoA similar one from earlier in the year: Usenet Archives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655905
- myth_drannon 23d agoI'm trying to figure out which one has more messages
- sparrowidle 23d agoGrabbed the UTZOO tapes off archive.org a while back, ~2GB compressed for 1981-1991, and recoll indexed the whole thing in an afternoon.
- alchemist1e9 23d agoAre those still up? no brainer to have for anyone serious.
- mmastrac 23d agomagnet:?xt=urn:btih:67177297E84766DFBF1C9EAAC6CF44B6F40BF3D1 I haven't checked it out myself but I've heard that some posts were removed from this magnet.
- hn1rig3rak 23d agoIf you go local, notmuch beat recoll for me on the mbox split, ~2M messages indexed in about 40 min on a cheap SSD.
- kingrolo 23d agoAh this has reminded me of dejanews.com the usenet archive. Before the days of Stack Overflow that was absolute gold for looking up an error message or code issue. If I remember rightly Google bought the data when they shutdown and incorporated it into Google Groups.
- doublerabbit 23d agoAnd then axed Google Groups and refused to release the data. Typical Google.
- mistrial9 22d agoyou can bet any spicey stuff went into your dossier, too
- cstadler1869 21d agoTry https://usenet-rewind.com/ https://usenet-rewind.com/
- doublerabbit 23d agoIt's nice that usenet still exists today, although if not mainly for warez. It's sad that it's now powered by only four usenet backbones.
- fros1y 23d agoLogistically, these collections usually exclude alt.binaries traffic entirely. I often wonder if there are enough obsessive collectors out there to piece together an archive from ancient tapes and hard drives.
- msephton 23d agoJust found some cool old stuff thanks to this: 1996-01-17: first post! a reply to a thread in alt.music.bjork 1996-03-11: first mention of my website/homepage No links to avoid my own embarrassment.
- BugsJustFindMe 23d ago> No links to avoid my own embarrassment. There are only 7 posts in alt.music.bjork on the first date, and one of them has your name on it. There's 1 post with your name on the second date, and it gives a website. The earliest wayback entry for that website redirects to another wayback location that exists.
- msephton 22d agoWell done.
- TehCorwiz 23d agoUpvoting for visibility ;)
- alfiedotwtf 23d agoWhere is the source of all these Usenet services? I thought people just stopped mirroring when Google groups got so prolific? I wonder how big all of this is minus the *.binaries
- vinc 23d agoYou can visit only 25 pages on the website with a free account, that's a bit too limiting. I'd suggest limiting the number of searches maybe but not the pagination over the results. I got curious again to find my old posts and figured I could download and grep the mbox files from Internet Archive instead.
- ember_ilands 23d ago[flagged]
- retrac 23d agoVery cool. I've been working on something similar. My cutoff date is 1994 as Usenet changes substantially in nature then. May I ask how you collected the data? Usenet is not fully archived anywhere. No one has a complete set. I am aware of: * the NewNews disc series on CD from '91 - '93 which has a substantial text feed for the big groups during that era (most of these are on IA.org, but some are not!) * The Dejanews archives via Google up to c. 2013. Also up on IA.org These are lacking large amounts of early posts, and are highly spotty before about 1994 (when Dejanews started). * The Utzoo tapes over at https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive cover a part of '81 - '91 but only from one host. "Far parts" of Usenet over in Japan or Europe are barely covered. * Some groups preserve per-newsgroup histories scattered all over and tending to drop offline over the years * fj.* is well-archived but it's Japanese The chart speaks for itself I think as to coverage: https://i.imgur.com/WCQm4od.png https://i.imgur.com/WCQm4od.png I got so desperate as to go scanning zip and tar files on old ftp sites for anything with a Usenet header. That scored a few hundred thousand articles mostly from the 90s. The big spike in the early 90s is from those CDs archives in the months where I had access. It gives an idea for how limited those Giganews/Google and other surviving archives are. I figure less than 50% early text Usenet survives, unless someone has vast hordes of data that they are not disclosing. As for the Utzoo archives - they're legally encumbered and some of the posters sue anyone who hosts them. (They're not available from the IA - taken down.) You have a takedown page but the legal and copyright issues were one of the main back-burner items keeping me from making my archive live. Some of the more eccentric Usenet personalities are still alive. Same with privacy issues. I notice you have full text search. I was reluctant to do that for privacy reasons. I discovered very early on how to index by email but that felt quite invasive. I took that out, and built a graph of all the X-refs: which turned out to be more interesting (walking the discussion trees) and somewhat more privacy preserving in that you can explore but not search. I was also thinking of an AI-based content warning filter, because I have a "random post" button and it is sometimes wild what that lands on.
- TrueRider 23d ago[dead]