[HN Gopher] The geeks who saved Usenet (2002)
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The geeks who saved Usenet (2002)
Author : slyall
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-03-16 04:56 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.salon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.salon.com)
| dang wrote:
| One small past thread:
|
| _The geeks who saved Usenet (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811983 - July 2011 (7
| comments)
| buescher wrote:
| I don't miss cascades.
| chaimanmeow wrote:
| bring back rec.trolling and alt.flamewars
| superkuh wrote:
| Be the change you want to see. Usenet text groups are still
| there. You can get posting access via https://www.eternal-
| september.org/ now that most ISPs have dropped usenet over the
| false 2004-2008 era scaremongering about it.
|
| Come back to usenet. Life is good. There's still some spam but
| it's honestly less than you get on any link aggregator on the
| web these days.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Is there a good writeup of how to do it and where to look for
| active groups? I set up a reader on my sdf account a while
| ago but I didn't end up finding much conversation.
| iso1631 wrote:
| alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
|
| Always sounded hilarious (personally I loved Wes). Later found
| out how much the anti-wesley feeling affected Wil Wheton
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| That does suck for Will who was a child at the time. The
| character is probably the most egregious Mary Sue of all time
| though.
| LukeShu wrote:
| Was he really that bad for most if it though? If we ignore
| the cluster of bad Wesley episodes that only happened
| because of the 1988 writers' strike?
| ghaff wrote:
| Both TNG and DS9 had characters inserted to appeal to
| younger audiences that were mostly annoying/irrelevant to
| older ones. (DS9 at least had the excuse of being set on
| a space station.) If the producers weren't thinking about
| demographics, they wouldn't have been there. The original
| series wasn't immune either.
| LukeShu wrote:
| Sure, there's playing demographics, and then there's
| inserting "the most egregious Mary Sue of all time". I
| don't think anyone considers Jake Sisko or Nog to be on
| the level of Wesley Crusher.
| Arrath wrote:
| Yeah I would have to agree. Nog especially, most Mary
| Sue's don't end up with prosthetics and PTSD.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not really. Although I could have generally lived with a
| lower presence on DS9. (But it made at least more sense
| in the context than TNG.)
| spudlyo wrote:
| Bring back Usenet Performance Art:
| alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk.
|
| See also The Meow Wars.[0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars
| influx wrote:
| Thanks for killing Dejanews google. :(
| ghaff wrote:
| I haven't examined it but there's apparently a Usenet archive
| independent of Google at https://www.usenetarchives.com/
|
| I assume things are also on the IA in some form.
|
| Probably my earliest memory of Usenet (and really the Internet)
| is that after The Empire Strikes Back, there were endless posts
| on, I think, rec.arts.sflovers about whether [SPOILER :-)] Darth
| Vader was Luke's father. Someone at the AI Lab printed out the
| whole thread on the Lab's doubtless very expensive laser printer,
| bound it, and brought it into the movie committee office where I
| was hanging out a fair bit that summer
| WalterGR wrote:
| _Usenet archive independent of Google
| athttps://www.usenetarchives.com/_
|
| Their stats from https://www.usenetarchives.com/stats.php:
| Documents / Posts: 16,032,489 Average Document: 3.71 KB
| Storage Size: 56.76 GB (7.75%) Stats Collected: Mar 16,
| 2021, 17:34 EST
|
| The article says that Google had archived _700 million_ posts.
| escape_goat wrote:
| That archive appears to be in the middle of a database
| migration, so it's possible that this deficiency is
| temporary. It is (as of last report) actually a single-
| developer project that just launched in January, apparently
| with enough pull to get a shout-out from VICE's
| "Motherboard". The current privacy policy reserves the right
| do basically whatever they want with your usage data.
| WalterGR wrote:
| _That archive appears to be in the middle of a database
| migration, so it 's possible that this deficiency is
| temporary._
|
| I guess as of ~6 months ago the archive weighed in at 300
| GB and 300 million posts, so hopefully temporary: https://w
| ww.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/in6u06/free_usenet_...
|
| _as of last report_
|
| Where does one find the reports? Here are the creator's
| posts to Reddit, at least:
| https://www.reddit.com/user/emolinare/submitted/
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| At that size, it is feasible to download to a laptop
| computer. If it was made available for download, it would
| greatly increase the odds of it surviving as there would not
| be a single point of failure.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Cursory googling suggests that there's no single, kind of
| 'master' backup available. What seems to be downloadable
| are various (apparently thousands of separate) archives
| from Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/usenet and
| https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical
|
| It would take a ton of work to combine them for sure, but I
| absolutely agree it's important.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Every message should have in it's header:
| 1. A unique message ID 2. The ID of the parent
| message 3. The group it was posted to
| 4. The subject line 5. The authors email and
| name 6. the date/time of posting
|
| So rebuilding a single repository of linked messages is
| TOTALLY do-able, and mostly programmatically to boot.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Ironically, Salon learned nothing from their own feature and its
| own discussion forum "TableTalk" was only narrowly saved by third
| parties (especially the Internet Archive) when they dumped it
| some years later.
|
| Unfortunately, too late to save the quite brilliant
| _International Issues_ section, which had been arrogantly deleted
| without notice years before presumably because it was deemed
| "foreign" as well as being a cost-sink.
|
| It housed some of the most brilliant discussions I've ever read
| online, now mostly lost forever afaik.
|
| Strangely, Salon's own incompetence and lack of concern for
| guardianship is completely missing from the article.
|
| https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-tabletalk-panic
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