Topic drift: The death of Usenet

[Sam Trenholme]

> The things I don't like about these easily outnumber the things which I do
> like. For example, with usenet you have (had) discussions on all possible
> topics on one server. With forums, you have to find each individual server
> and create an useraccount if you want to post or sometimes even to read.

I prefer the one zillion different forums approach myself, because it
helps minimize the issues with cliques Usenet had.  If I don't like
the clique in on Linux support forum, for example, I can go to 20
other forums without the same clique.  If, in 1995, I didn't like the
clique in comp.os.linux.misc, there was no alternative.

If forums had a NNTP interface, this would be a non-issue.  Just fire
up leafnode, grab the articles via NNTP from 20 different web forums,
and they are now all in one place: Your hard disk.  (Leafnode may have
to add group name remapping support for the 10 different
NNTP-supported forums that call their Linux support forum
"text.linux"; this would even have been useful a few years back when
"Usenet II" existed, allowing people to map this to
"usenet2.net.whatever")

> Also, I could do without reading on things I'm interested in without
> Google or whatever advertising agency propping up ads that I did not ask
> for.

You know, I think the commercialization of the internet is a good
thing and a bad thing.  It's a good thing because a lot of quality
content we would not otherwise have is now here.

It is a bad thing because it makes it harder for find quality
non-commercial resources.  For example, I was recently looking around
for a good open-source Sudoku generator.  Google was useless; it kept
giving me different links to the same handful of shareware Suduku
generators.  Finally, after some digging from my archives, I found a
couple of excellent GPL Sudoku generators:

http://www.lemo.dk/sudoku/
http://puzzle.gr.jp/

> Every forum has its own controls, look and threading model (?) to get used
> to. I like to control myself how posts should be threaded and would like
> to be able to do my own filtering and scoring, etc.

This is what a lot of other people have been saying that they miss
about Usenet.  This is an issue that can be solved by giving a web
forum a decent NNTP interface.

> FudForum [1] is open source forum software which also allows mailinglist
> and nntp interfaces.

My issue with FudForum and the other open-source solutions is this:
They solve a problem which is no longer relevant.  They allow a given
web forum to be a convenient front-end to Usenet.  What I want is
different.  I don't care about Usenet any more; it's dead.  My goal is
not to make a web front end so people can more easily read the useless
flame wars in comp.os.linux.advocacy.

But I care about NNTP; I want to have offline reading, TRN's really
cool threading support, text-only compatibility (this is especially
useful for blind people), and the other goodies.  My focus is
different: Let's have a NNTP front end that allows us to access the
web forum from TRN or whatever.

(More info about FUDforum and Usenet:
http://cvs.prohost.org/index.php/Newsgroup_Manager)

> There have been initiatives to (mode)rate articles on usenet such as
> NoCeM control messages, or GroupLens [2] ratings. All of these seem to
> have died a silent death though, while both of them seem like workable
> solutions to me had they gained enough support and momentum.

I think the issue here is the same one that Usenet had with HTML
messages: People did not want Usenet to change at all.  They got what
they wanted: A stagnant messaging system whose doom began when Matt's
wwwboard showed up, really started to lose users with Slashcode and
Scoop (kuro5hin.org), and was downright hemorrhaging users once
Vbulletin and phpbb were on the scene.

People don't post to rec.games.computer.doom.editing any more (it
hasn't had a single post in the last month); they now post to
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-editing/.  It's very telling that a
group for a game whose peak in popularity coincided with Usenet's peak
[1] is now deserted.

> And had HTML been allowed, it would have played much nicer with modern
> browsers and clients. Those who want to read "text only" can then easily
> filter on their end (or even ask the NNTP server to show them the text
> only version if available?)

The plan is my head is to have something that fairly easily converts
from text-only to HTML, and from HTML to text only.  *word* becomes
bold, _word_ becomes italics, and anything that needs ASCII art (or
code samples) can be done with a tag like [pre]...[/pre] (this would
be the *only* tag it will support).  Bulleted lists can be done with
'* ' at the beginning of a line (where the next line with text at the
beginning of the line ends the list.  Links are automatically
converted in to hotlinks.

- Sam

[1] For the pedants: I'm not talking about binary newsgroups.  I'm
talking about text-based Usenet.