Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Google Groups has announced it will end support for Usenet – a significant change that undoes one of the early decisions that propelled the search and ads giant to dominance. Usenet predated the world wide web by more than a decade and comprised a federated set of newsgroups – threaded conversations that weren't vastly …

[Anonymous Coward]

Bait

and Switch.

[veti]

Re: Bait

I don't think you can use that phrase when the switch takes 20 years to execute.

[MJB7]

Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

No. Google has decided Google doesn't need Usenet anymore.

However, I used to follow a dozen groups or so, and I haven't looked at any of them in certainly the last five years. I doubt I am alone.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

I used to follow and post to a few Usenet newsgroups, too -- via a Usenet/Fidonet gateway. I stopped, not due to anything relating to Usenet or Fidonet, but due to more-urgent demands upon my time.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

The usenet groups I used to follow have migrated to Facebook. I didn't follow them. <shrug>

[the spectacularly refined chap]

Re: Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

        
        
What killed newgroups _was_ Google. Firstly they did not implement an interface that wrapped lines as was/is the established convention meaning reading anything from GG was a ballache and/or impossible.
        
        
Next, they did absolutely _nothing_ to control spam to the extent many people simply resorted to dicarding _anything_ from Google which has the inevitable effect of fragmenting the community.
        
        
It's a shame really since there are still a few good groups with valuable content, if only you can filter out all the GG spam.
        
        

Edit: Dammit. El Reg is smart enough to wrap text even with < code > or < pre > tags.

[Dizzy Dwarf]

Re: Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

Google Groups spam ...

https://www.novabbs.com/SEARCH/search_nocem.php?stats=daily

Before 2024-02-22: ~30,000 spam posts / day

After 2024-02-22: ~2,000 spam posts / day and dropping - mostly because there are contactable admins who care.

Google Groups dropping usenet support is the best thing that's happened to usenet for years.

[katrinab]

Re: Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

I think Reddit, and more recently Lemmy have replaced what Usenet used to do.

Lemmy is federated, so more in the spirit of the original Usenet.

[HelpfulJohn]

Re: Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

I recently [last Thursday, the 19th?] had a technical issue.

The Usenet people in the comp.* groups were exceedingly nice, ploite and *helpful*. As they usually have been for 30-ish years.

They resolved the issue.

It wasn't something a corporate support page would deal with. Apart from having a conversation with a bunch of techies in the pub,

there isn't really any way of getting ancient wisdom.

Usenet *is* a "bunch of techies in the pub". It's a million conversations on a million subjects all running at once. As most of them are

utterly unmoderated some have the odd crank, nutter, zealot or raving lunatic making vast amounts of noise and they sometimes have

oceans of commercial scams posted to groups for a while but the signal is worth the noise.

Usenet has helped me immensely. For thirty years or so.

And places like rec.pets.cats, rec.arts.poems and others have been fun "meeting grounds".

Google letting go might be a good thing. It might cut down on the wasted bandwidth called "spam". Maybe.

Or it might finally end Usenet. That would be a shame.

Merry Christmas and may everyone have a lovely New Year.

(Pokes at the clock. Oh. Thursday was the 21st. Sorry. :) )

[Anonymous Coward]

Tin foil hat .?

USENET makes almost all the bonkers laws passed to "think of the children" redundant.

[FrogsAndChips]

Re: Tin foil hat .?

Children? On Usenet? Today?

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: Tin foil hat .?

Next Tuesday

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Tin foil hat .?

Next September

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Tin foil hat .?

Me to!*

>>> Next September

* cam.misc

sci.crypt

uk.telecom

comp.risks

Oh, the good old days. Plus getting plenty of practice 'debating' in various alt.flame.* groups, or just sometimes editing a few chars in multipart messages in assorted alt.binaries.* on one of the UK's biggest NNTP servers.

[Jusme]

Good

They can't monetise, track or censor you on usenet. Port 119 ftw!

[Trixr]

Re: Good

But they can spam enough to make it functionally useless - excepting the miniscule number of newsgroups that have active moderation.

[DoctorNine]

Re: Good

That's why I left. Spam volume made finding anything almost impossible.

[MJI]

With broken support to NGs

It is hard anyway, only follow a couple and has been via googles search of them, will need a different way in now.

As usual it is because it is what goole decide no the users

[Anonymous Coward]

Good riddance!

As an active user of Usenet I can only express the shared "HOORAY!!!" that everyone on the groups I use expressed when this news hit. Nothing but GARBAGE has been getting shared on Usenet from Google for quite some time now so far as I can tell. Maybe now those of us that still actually use the service won't have to continue setting up filter after filter on our readers to weed out the junk.

[Whiskers]

Re: Good riddance!

The increasing disruption originating from Google Groups users, was one of the factors that encouraged me to stop using Usenet, some years ago. Other distractions from "real" life also had something to do with it. I might have another look, now. This is good news indeed.

[HelpfulJohn]

Re: Good riddance!

Sadly, there are a couple of "friends" I've made over the years who post from GG.

I'll miss them.

Unless they finally go for a better access method. Which they might.

And the good news is that Archimedes Plutonium will be silenced! A Christmas Miracle indeed.

.

.

Will *probably* be silenced. :(

[Uncle Slacky]

The spam was coming from inside the house

Lately something like 98% of Usenet spam has been coming from Google Groups, to the point that it was being blocked by many Usenet admins, so this will actually come as a relief.

For anyone looking for free Usenet access (excluding binaries) there's http://www.eternal-september.org/

[jake]

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

Indeed, I've been dropping go ogle content as spam for about two decades on the systems I take care of.

With over 35K users, across a small handful of Usenet servers, I have had absolutely zero complaints about that content being "missing".

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[Adrian 4]

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

As the mass users went to facebook and similar scumsites, it makes me wonder if Usenet is worthwhile again. Surely there's nobody to spam there any more and maybe it will become again the tech paradise it once was.

OK. But I can dream, can't I ?

[heyrick]

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

I gave up on Usenet about a decade ago. The crap to useful ratio was getting ridiculous. To add to that, I no longer had a news reader/fetcher setup (different machine) and I found Google's Groups to be annoying to use, so in the end I just left.

Participating in that sort of stuff Way Back When was quite a time sink. When you're in your twenties, a few hours per evening, no big deal. When you're in your forties, fuck it, got better things to do.

I don't miss it, and I doubt I'm missed. I'm just glad I'm old enough to have enjoyed it rather than the half-arsed nonsense that passes for "social" these days. I only needed one program. Now I'd need...

...a Facebook app, an Insta app, a Twitter app, a WhatsApp app...

...messages that remind me of the good times, messages that remind me of the better times...

(I get knocked down, but I get up again...)

Sorry, no idea what the hell my brain was thinking when that popped into my mind, but I'm on break at work and it's been a bit of a shitty day so I just thought I'd go with it. I'll go get my coat.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

The usefulness of Google Groups was it was possible to dip into when on Somebody Else's Computer - library, work, friends, etc. without needing a news client. A few months ago I tried a no-install run-only client on a USB drive in the library, and port 119 was blocked, so even that route is blocked off. And last time I tried to run a file from a USB drive on a work computer, it deleted it. Everything is becoming walled gardens surrounded by electric fences and guards with cattle prods.

[Grogan]

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

Back in the good old days, Netscape had capable usenet functionality built in. It wasn't the best client, but it did automatically decode attachments (and show pictures inline). I started out using tin (and pine for email) on a Unix shell, but when I got an ISP at home I first started just reading newsgroups with Netscape. I got Free Agent soon after that.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

I started out using tin (and pine for email) on a Unix shell

Likewise. And ran my own news server and periodically grabbed stuff from the groups I was interested in (uk.rec.motorcycles mostly). I could ssh in from anywhere and read the news..

Eventually got bored with it all and found other stuff to spend my time on.

[Sam 15]

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

Hmm.

1. Spam coming from/via Google Groups ramps up to massive proportions (swamping many groups).

2. Google decides to axe Groups, leading to many people to say "Good Riddance!".

Was that spam flood like a artillery barrage to soften up the battlefield?

[Pascal Monett]

"binary (non-text) file sharing"

Is that the new designation of pirated content ?

[jake]

Re: "binary (non-text) file sharing"

No, it's very old (in Internet time).

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: "binary (non-text) file sharing"

I encode, you encode, uuencode...

(And a moment too for shar, an archive format for a more innocent time.)

[Panicnow]

Embrace, Extend, Extinquish

Yet another example of corporate theft of public spaces.

Please keep (SMTP) Email safe, it's being assaulted on all fronts!

There is nothing the other messaging apps offer, that couldn't have been added to the open, distributed platform.

[fg_swe]

NEW_SMTP

Big Companies have already in some ways monopolized Email. They did that by means of complex mechanisms that allegedly defend SMTP from SPAM and other nasty usage. By this, they have made it hard to run your own one-guy SMTP server.

There exist simple protocols to combat this, such as CAPTCHA challenges to new communication partners.

DeltaChat is a open source chat app based on SMTP and GNUpg.

Then there are the XAMPP based chat programs.

But most sheeple will use the mainstream corporate (or worse) controlled apps like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal. I do so too, because none of my friends was interested in DeltaChat. It looks as if mankind loves to live in gold plated cages, until they scratch off the gold surface and realize the steel bars.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: NEW_SMTP

By this, they have made it hard to run your own one-guy SMTP server

Nonsense. Even if you can't handle the nuts and bolts yourself, there are plenty of open-source mainserver-in-a-box setups. All they need is a linux machine and internet connectivity.. (best not to do it from a home IP address or you'll be blocked by default by a lot of servers - one of the reasons why I pay for a commercial-grade fibre connection).

I'm admittedly an outlier (been running mail servers for decades at home starting with the dial-up Demon Internet days with early linux, dial-on-demand, qmail and fetchmail to todays gigbit FTTP, a mail appliance from proxmox to do all the anti-spam stuff and a Devuan box running postfix as the mail store) but for anyone vaguely technically competent it's not that hard.

[Martin an gof]

Re: NEW_SMTP

best not to do it from a home IP address or you'll be blocked by default by a lot of servers

Been running a Pi on a domestic IP (fixed) as a mail server for some years now, personal stuff only. Only a very few mailservers have refused connections as far as I'm aware; happens once or twice a year at most. The biggest problem I have is that some "validation" scripts refuse the domain I use - .cymru - either when you are filling in a web contact form or very, very rarely by the receiving server which then bounces it, and that's nothing to do with the actual mechanics of the server or connection.

One form of the filter seems to be particularly brain dead; I had a reply from a RealPerson™ a few years ago admitting that their filter rejected all TLDs with more than three characters (since fixed). Just a couple of months back I had a web form refuse .cymru with the unusually helpful error message that domains with more than four characters are not valid; usually they just refuse to post the form, either highlighting the box you "haven't completed" or without any error at all, leaving you to guess what you've done wrong.

M.

[Grogan]

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinquish

I still use POP3 (I hate IMAP and MAPI) and SMTP (listening on multiple ports in case of port blocking and I can do plain, SSL or TLS... sue me)... but I run my own mail server to do it. I don't trust anybody to run my mail, especially not "Google". Moreover, when I see a business communication from a gmail or hotmail etc. I think that business is mickey mouse. You'd have to be some kind of asshole to rely on free webmail for your business communications. I'm not even sure I want my replies stored on their servers.

[jake]

USENET IS DEAD!

FILM AT 11!

Seriously, we knew go ogle was bad for Usenet when they fucked up the absolutely priceless DejaNews archive almost immediately after taking it over. Seems the gookids didn't understand how to take care of a simple ASCII text archive ... and were too fucking stupid to ask for help. Presumably all that info is lost forever now. Bastards.

Fortunately, the rest of us are still happily up and running. Try DDGing for "free text Usenet" or ask a local Uni for a feed. (You will probably have to pay if you want access to the binary hierarchies.)

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: USENET IS DEAD!

Has Netcraft confirmed it?

[nematoad]

Re: USENET IS DEAD!

" Try DDGing "

Plus 1 for saying that instead of "Google"

[Grogan]

Re: USENET IS DEAD!

I've switched. The only thing I use Google for now is watching the occasional youtube video.

Nowadays, I'm not having any trouble with Duck Duck Go. At worst, I might have to type two key words before it starts pulling up what I want. Google may have gotten it in one lol

[Proton_badger]

Re: USENET IS DEAD!

Google search have deteriorated though, their ranking system probably highly influenced by "commercial interests"...

[sabroni]

Re: Nowadays, I'm not having any trouble with Duck Duck Go

Really? It's started putting Spanish language results at the top of my searches. I don't speak Spanish and I've never read a Spanish article or browsed a Spanish site.

TBH I've just about to give up on DDG, I've defaulted to Google at work because I was searching DDG then having to search again in Google every time.

YMMV.

[Binraider]

Lot of history on Usenet.

The more than somewhat legally dubious uses are an obvious reason why someone would want to clamp down on it. The only recent usage I've heard about has been involved the dark side of file sharing - and the weirdly permissive license that I don't know how true or not the definitions claimed by those file sharing gizmos are.

[Dizzy Dwarf]

nttp servers, free to register:

https://www.eternal-september.org/

https://www.i2pn2.org/

(aioe.org too, but down for a few months - I think his raid crashed and took out all his disks)

Web interfaces:

https://narkive.com/

https://novabbs.com/computers/index.php

[Chris Gray 1]

Excellent

Thanks for pointing those out. I think I never got a reply message the last time I tried Eternal September (with gnus), and had since forgotten about it. Maybe the web-based ones will work better for me.

I do miss comp.arch !

[MGJ]

Been A While

Where will I go for all my BC3000 news now?

[Barry Rueger]

Another brick in the wall

I'm sitting here waiting for the day when Musk or Google or Facebook finally figure out how to kill off email and force us into some variant of Slack or YouTube.

And yes I'm serious.

One by one it feels like every on-line tool that I've ever relied on has been bought up and either ruined or shut down entirely.

It's a shame. I can recall when the Internet was a shiny new thing, full of hope and opportunity. Now it's an ad-infested mess and a constant battle to do simple tasks.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Re: Another brick in the wall

This will never happen. Email is too well ingrained in society's fabric to be taken over by corporate interests.

WhatsApp has taken over the role of IRC, but that's about as far as it will go.

[katrinab]

Re: Another brick in the wall

WhatsApp has taken over the role of AOL Instant Messenger?

Maybe there are public WhatsApp groups, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't the default use case. People are more likely to go to Discord for that.

[doublelayer]

Re: Another brick in the wall

I think you're looking at this in the wrong way. Email won't be killed off. If it goes, and I think that's going to take a long time, it will die a natural death. Anyone is free to set up a mail server and use it, either using the traditional protocols or using some of the security overlays designed to make spam a little harder which are also available as open specifications. Some providers can make it less interoperable, but they can't take it from you entirely. If email dies, it will be because people have decided that they no longer want to communicate that way, not because someone else made it impossible. True, if the free mail providers discontinue their services, that will make more people abandon it, but those people could have found a different provider and continued to use the protocol. If you're afraid of decentralized things dying, look at the users, or more importantly the former users, rather than the competitors. The competitors can't kill them. They can only entice users to do it for them.

[Martin an gof]

Re: Another brick in the wall

Email won't be killed off. If it goes, and I think that's going to take a long time, it will die a natural death

I agree with the natural death part, not sure about the long time. There are plenty of "normal" people who do not have personal email accounts, or if they do they don't use them other than for signing up for online services. They have a school email which disappears when they leave school but increasingly school communication is online class chats. They have a university email likewise; they have a work email. Communication with friends and relatives is purely via some messaging app or other and increasingly even work communication is via the excerable Teams. This is becoming common even outside the organisation; I've several times been invited by third parties to join Teams planning something between our two organisations. Rather than an easily skimmed list of emails, I have to log in to and switch between a gazillion narrow-interest Teams. On a work computer which struggles with Outlook and positively grinds to a halt when you launch Teams.

Not progress.

You know that "digital detox" fad some people are trying to push? Maybe the best sort of digital detox would be to force the IT department to run everything over a (let's be generous) 56k modem link for a month. Or throttle Microsoft HQ to a T1.

M.

[jake]

Re: Another brick in the wall

"Probably better to throttle Microsoft."

FTFY.

For the record, I've been slowly, one at a time, re-introducing friends and family to email since roughly the middle of Covid. They are taking to it. Common comment runs along the lines of "OMG! I'd forgotten how easy and useful and fast email is!".

Probably doesn't hurt that I run the server, and I'm rather draconian when it comes to spam ...

_{Want "digital detox"? I haven't even seen my phone in about ten days. I know where it is, mind (hill-top pump house), I just don't care.}

[HelpfulJohn]

Re: Another brick in the wall

Email is "fast"?

Not in my world. People take days or weeks to read any I send and rarely if ever reply or respond.

It was a good medium when I was working and emailing clients and coworkers but family and friends dont use it much.

Usenet even less so.

[ecofeco]

Re: Another brick in the wall

Why did you leave out MS?

[sabroni]

Re: Why did you leave out MS?

Because they just aren't that relevant. What crucial part of the web to they supply? Bing? IIS?

But, don't let that stop you repeating the same tedious talking points on every article you find!

[StrangerHereMyself]

Demise

The demise of Aioe.org and Albasani have hurt the takeup of NNTP. Probably they were getting to many LEA requests and weren't interested in servicing them (i.e. rat out users) and closed shop instead.

There are still many accessible free NNTP providers out there, such as Eternal September, but they make you jump through too many hoops in order for you to post on their servers. Best would be to have some free NNTP desktop client with a pre-installed Usenet account where you just jump in a go. Aioe.org allowed you to post without any registration but I haven't seen any other Usenet provider copying this.

[Whiskers]

Re: Demise

For those who can afford €10 a year, Individual.net ("The Berlin Server") is still around. They were very reliable for me. No binaries :))

[Dizzy Dwarf]

Re: Demise

Make you go through hoops? They just ask you to register. Not unreasonable and not exactly hoops.

If they didn't, they would quickly because a source of spam and nobody would peer with them anyway.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Re: Demise

Then why didn't this happen with aioe.org? You could post without any registration.

[the spectacularly refined chap]

Re: Demise

They were killed on sight by many servers, not always just for local users but also for mirroring to other nodes. I used them briefly until I realised a sizable portion of the readership on many groups never saw my posts.

[heyrick]

alt.sysadmin.recovery

That is all.

[Alan J. Wylie]

Re: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Someone started a new thread there in June: "Subject: Quiet in here". Only 31 posts since then.

[Sn!pe]

Re: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Do you have a chicken? No? There you go...

[oldstevo]

Re: alt.sysadmin.recovery

we never mention the chicken!!

Although it's been a good 2 decades since I was regularly in the monastery

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Although it's been a good 2 decades since I was regularly in the monastery

Likewise. I think I was a network manager when I last patronised the place.

[Pete Sdev]

Re: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Ah, the Scary Devil Monastery.

[Anonymous Coward]

Usenet ... is that still a thing?

I remember (about 28 years ago) using Usenet. It's always been very wild west and quite toxic.

Went from there to channels in IRC, then to standard social media.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Usenet ... is that still a thing?

It's always been very wild west and quite toxic.

Rubbish. Different groups had different cultures.

[jake]

Re: Usenet ... is that still a thing?

Usenet could/can seem toxic to the neophyte, but it was/is actually quite friendly once you came/come to terms with the reality of the situation and learn(ed) to use your wetware to filter out the bullshit. Fiddling around with bozo filters was/is a time sink of the first order.

Dropping entire toxic providers and open proxies on the floor is both trivial, and recommended for someone running a small system of their own. Easier, and doesn't clutter things up quite as badly.

[HelpfulJohn]

Re: Usenet ... is that still a thing?

Rec.arts.poems (or was it r.a.poetry ?) was fun. So was rec.pets.cats for a time.

The sci.math, sci.space." and sci.physics* groups were often brilliant sources of entertainment, education and help.

Loads of the comp.* hierarchy groups were full of helpful people who were very knowledgeable.

Today, the lunatics flood many of those groups with paranoid fantasies and pseudo-science word salads and the scammers and

spammers drown them in waves of cruft until someone filters them out of the feeds.

However, alt.tasteless *was* a little bit ....... eccentric? I do not reccommend it. :)

[Roger Kynaston]

my usenet experience

I followed an alt.sailing group for a while but as most of the contributers seemed to be from the east coast of the US and ignored anyone not sailing there I didn't stay on longer.

I do remember and liking sunmanagers mailing list though.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Thank heavens for that!

Google Groups has been "suffering" a distributed denial of service attack for several months. Unfortunately, instead of dealing with it, they've carried on stuffing all the illegitimate mail onto Usenet. So every user has suffered. One group I was following then, comp.lang.c, had about 4k messages on my ISP's server. After Google's negligence of the last few months, it went up to 137k, all but but a tiny number off topic, obscene, in unfamiliar languages, and so on.

The problem with Usenet is that it depended on gentlemen's agreements to keep running, and Google doesn't do gentlemen's agreements. Up until Google waded in, every news server knew who their users were, and kept a fairly tight discipline on them posting off-topic or worse. It worked well. Google simply didn't bother about bad posts, like they couldn't be bothered about so many things. So this DDOS was going to happen at some stage, and it's happened now.

Maybe after February Usenet might recover a bit, with this large rogue server no longer fouling it up. Let's hope so!

[Dizzy Dwarf]

Re: Thank heavens for that!

This is Google's SRE rubbish at work.

They think the customer - or a spam-bot - is happy when if they press 'send' then message gets sent. And if it doesn't, just add more compute. At no point will it be necessary to notify a human.

[mtp]

Good while it lasted

Usenet was good in the 1990s, comp. and sci. groups were my lunchtime viewing and I even used Emacs as a reader. Took a break from Usenet in the late 90s and when I looked again the signal/noise which had been deteriorating for years had dropped to the point were it was not worth the effort.

I hate to think what it is like now.

Sad that it is gone but it had no defence against spam so once the threat of your university / company taking action against you if you made a bad post was gone it was doomed.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Good while it lasted

it had no defence against spam

That's not really accurate, but the story of Usenet's battles with spam — from feed filtering to Canter & Siegel to cancelbots to moderation — is too long to try to research and summarize for a forum post.

[jake]

Re: Good while it lasted

"is too long to try to research and summarize for a forum post."

I tried last night, but gave up. There's an entire book in there, but I don't think I'm the one to write it. I was just a bit-player, maybe four-five steps up from NPCs like the meowers.

TINC

[Will Godfrey]

Still dropping in to Usenet from time to time.

I'm another one on Eternal September. I don't have much to say there but like to browse around when I'm at a bit of a loose end.

Thumb up cos. the big bad troll is going!

[Sam Adams the Dog]

Well, some of us still remember rec.aquarium vs. sci.aquarium from the '80s, perhaps the first online flame war. At least, the first I encountered.

-P.

[Michael Wojcik]

I'm not sure when that one was, or what other candidates there are for "the first online flame war". I don't know of any decent historical study of early flame wars, which I think is a pity; it's an interesting subject. In fact there doesn't seem to be a lot of academic work on the subject — at any rate, I'm not aware of much, and I used to be in that field (i.e., online rhetoric and writing).

There's the Flame Wars collection edited by Derry (which IIRC was originally a double issue of South Central Review), but as I recall most of the pieces in it are pretty theoretical without a lot of empirical analysis, much less historiography. I don't remember there being anything specifically on online flame wars in From A to &lt;A&gt; either.

I mentioned in another post that Talmadge's txtfile "The Flamers [sic] Bible" was posted in 1987, so certainly flame wars Were A Thing in the 1980s. They may have reached their apex, on Usenet, in the mid-1990s with such gems as Snopes' "shadow in a vacuum" troll post on rec.sf.star-trek — perhaps the best-crafted piece of flame bait I've ever read.

[jake]

"the first online flame war"

vi vs EMACS, followed by (and partially concurrent with) C vs C++ would be good contenders. Both existed before Usenet. PC vs Mac came in there somewhere, with the users of the also-rans sniping at the combatants from the bushes. Later, being mainly used by University students, sports rivalries featured for a while, and all the other highly polar bullshit that humans seem to have a need to argue about.

The whole MEOW thing was not a flame war. It was just a campaign of harassment of people who reacted quite nicely by some sadistic children[0] who knew how the system worked. It was quite late in time, and probably one of the last things on Usenet that could be called, loosely, a "flame war". IMO, it was more like vandalism, and demonstrated the so-called "tragedy of the commons" quite nicely.

_{[0] In fact, many of the participants (both sides!) were probably still in three-cornered pants when Usenet was born. Some likely still are, possibly through choice.}

[Claptrap314]

Subscribe to new group

alt.talk.scientology?

One of my fondest memories...

[CommanderGalaxian]

Oh FFS! I can't believe that in all of this you cite those pussies from alt.tastless when everybody who knows anything knows that the only flame war on Usenet that ever really mattrered (and was the flaming and trolling war that has forever set the bar at a level that has never again been witnessed anywhere (who gives a fck about careers ruined!?!?!?)) was the Meow Wars - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars

[Michael Wojcik]

Overstated, perhaps, which might explain the downvotes; but the Meow Wars were indeed a notable Usenet event. It was a time of liberal killfiling, certainly.

[Anonymous Coward]

thought it was PageRank wot won it for Google

Google was the first search engine to try to rank its results more intelligently than just "number of occurrences of the word you typed and let the advertisers pay for the top". That's what made it stand out in the early days, more so than integrating Usenet.

Weather that is still the case I'm not sure....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: thought it was PageRank wot won it for Google

>Google was the first search engine to try to rank its results more intelligently than just "number of occurrences of the word you typed and let the advertisers pay for the top".

You seem to have put your closing quote character eight words late in that sentence.

[Grogan]

It's been a very long time since I've used usenet, I spent a lot of time in newsgroups in the 90's. It's how I took my name even, from my favourite group, alt.tasteless. (A grogan is what they call a turd)

This just caused me to look and see if Free Agent was still a thing. They just call it "Agent" now, but yes it is. It's $29 shareware (30 day trial) and comes with a 3 month free usenet service. ($2.95/month for 20 Gb or $14.95 for unlimited if you want to keep using their servers). They advertise that Agent 8 can handle large binary attachments too.

That was the best usenet client, I'm glad to see it's still available, though I can't foresee myself going back to newsgroups.

[Michael Wojcik]

Best client is in the eye of the user, no doubt. Personally, I used nn for a number of years, and eventually moved to my own customized version of xrn, with vi as my editor and a script I wrote for selecting one of my many sig quotes at random. (I could have used fortune for the last, but never got around to creating a fortune file from my collection.)

I use Thunderbird for some internal newsgroups here at work, but if I got back on Usenet I'd probably try building xrn again, just for the hell of it.

[RJK]

The remark about spam is a bit rich given the enormous quantities of Usenet spam emanating from Google.

[Martin an gof]

Once wondered about running my own server, purely for my own use

I dropped off usenet when I had to leave Demon and their free server but even at the time I wondered what it would take to run my own. I missed the Acorn groups and uk-diy. These days, a Raspberry Pi probably beats the servers Demon used in the 1990s, but just getting the peering sorted seems like hard work.

(Reasoning: my first proper job, mid 90s, I was building 33MHz 486 desktop machines with 4MB and 40MB HDDs and the company's Netware server was basically the same but with a bit more memory, bit more storage and a tape backup. Maybe it had a 50MHz chip. At home I was reading usenet on a 30MHz ARM 6 RiscPC with 4MB and a 40MB HDD over a 14k4 modem. A Pi4? Two or three orders of magnitude better than that server in all respects. Then again, 30 years have passed :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Once wondered about running my own server, purely for my own use

Running your own server isn't (or wasn't, back in the 90s) very hard. You had to be careful about what groups you'd store locally. Just opening up everything would choke your bandwidth and fill your disks with porn.

I forget which NNTP server we used, but it made it look like you had everything available locally. It wouldn't actually retrieve any articles until someone attempted to read from a given group, then it would download. It let you configure how long or how much disk space different groups could use and how much bandwidth they could consume).

Processor and memory demands were pretty minimal. Disk and bandwidth, NNTP would eat all you had.

I had it set up so things like comp.* and rec.* would keep a few months of data on hand. Meanwhile alt.binaries.* (and alt.bainaries.*, or however it was misspelled) was banished to its own hard drive and data cap.

Every so often, MRTG would show that our upstream Internet connection had saturated overnight. I'd see a corresponding surge on the switch port with the NNTP server and I'd go check the logs to see what new group to throttle. (Sometimes I'd find that someone on helpdesk had installed something like Limewire and I'd have to find what employee to throttle)

Sometimes the offending binaries groups were worth adding to the newsfeed at home.

More often it seemed like a good idea to completely disable caching those groups (as an ISP, I think we were legally in the clear as a common carrier, but if you could go to prison for having it on your own hard drive, I didn't want to take a chance with it on our servers).

[jake]

Re: Once wondered about running my own server, purely for my own use

"I forget which NNTP server we used,"

Leafnode? It couldcan be setup as you describe.

[jake]

Re: Once wondered about running my own server, purely for my own use

If you can get a feed (a local Uni or your Alma Mater will probably help. So will most commercial sites, if you aren't interested in bunnies and other high-volume binaries), look into leafnode.

[Martin an gof]

Re: Once wondered about running my own server, purely for my own use

Thanks. Over on this side of the pond there really isn't much tradition of your "Uni or Alma Mater" doing stuff like that. Apart from a few "stars" they usually just want you to graduate and get out of their hair.

When I was an undergraduate my Polytechnic ran VAXen mostly. A few departments had things like 11/785s but the general purpose computer was an 8650 when I started, supplemented by an 8800 a year or two later IIRC. All I had at home was a V.23 / V.22bis modem so at that point I just knew about BBSes. The Poly ran a set of local newsgroups on the VAX which was a good way to learn the ropes, as it were, for when I graduated, bought a better modem, signed up with Demon and suddenly discovered nntp.

As others have pointed out though, I was much younger and much more single back in those days and there were only four channels on my telly. It wasn't really (much) of a waste of my time to spend an hour or two, three or four days a week catching up with uk.d-i-y (or whatever). These days I probably spend that much time on taxi duties, but I suspect that the groups I used to frequent are probably much lower volume these days...

M.

[Alan J. Wylie]

A very timely RFC: RFC 9518 Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

RFC 9518, published just this morning.

Whereas early services like the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) and email had multiple interoperable providers, many contemporary platforms for content and services are operated by single commercial entities without any interoperable alternative -- to the point where some have become so well-known and important to people's experiences that they are commonly mistaken for the Internet itself

[Whiskers]

Re: A very timely RFC: RFC 9518 Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

<settles in for a bit of a read> Looks like a timely offering indeed.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: A very timely RFC: RFC 9518 Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

Yes, we've gone all the way back to the 1880s where you had to have half a dozen telephones if you wanted to be able to contact all your contacts as they were subscribers to a dozen different 'phone companies. I can write an email with Thunderbird and it is receivable by somebody using Outlook, Claws, K9, Pegasus, whatever. I can make a phone call from my Virgin phone and connect to somebody using EE, BT, KCC, NTT, AT&T, HKT, whatever. I should be able to send a message with LINE and the recipient should be able to receive it with WotsApp and forward it to somebody using Telegram.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

I remember having lots of informative and friendly, not to mention occasionally very funny, exchanges on a certain computer graphics group on Usenet , way back when.

It's a part of the Internet I still occasionally miss.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Fine

Fine with me. On the one hand, i slightly lament the move. On the other hand, I did find the interface confusing since they had some google-only groups, possibly mailing lists, and usenet groups. And a user interface that i found difficult compared to a standard usenet news reader. Reading a post was. easy. Doing a proper usenet-style reply was not, it wanted to put the quoted text in the wrong location with no apparent way to control it.

[Michael Wojcik]

transport

Most newsgroups used the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)

In Usenet — public Usenet, that is, the Big 8 and the alt hierarchy — transport was independent of group. For quite a number of years there was a mix of UUCP and NNTP nodes; it was just a question of how a given node got its feed. And there were nodes that had both types of feeds and served as gateways, of course; and gateways to other transports, such as email and HTTP.

So it'd be more accurate to say "most nodes eventually used the Network News Transfer Protoocol (NNTP)".

[jake]

Re: transport

UUCP is still in use in the back-ends for large email and USENET operations. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to why.

[Whiskers]

Usenet Improvement Project

<http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/index.html>

This dates from 2008, founded by the late and sorely missed "Blinky the Shark" (and with a minor anonymous contribution by me), but might still be an interesting read. Also has useful information about setting up filters for various Usenet clients and servers.