While I monitor only 5 Newsgroups, I have seen nothing to indicate that Usenet is inactive, let alone dead. The 4 Newsgroups of interest are: alt.sys.pdp11 comp.sys.dec comp.sys.dec.micro vmsnet.pdp-11 The third group is rarely active, but the other three have been surprisingly VERY active of late along with one other that I doubt is of interest to most of the list. Jerome Fine

"El Pais" ("The Country"?) is officially dead from May 20th.

On 2 Jun 2011 at 8:30, SPC wrote: Didn't Duke shut down their news server May 20 of *last year*? How many members of the student body even knew in 2010 that Duke maintained an active news server? --Chuck

"precursor to the internet"????? If Cern were to shut down their server, would WWW die? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Well, UMN shut down their gopher server, and we're not dead yet. :) -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Support your local hospital. Play hockey. ----------------------------------

Chuck Guzis wrote: No pretty pictures and flash menus so why would you expect them to know what Usenet is. BTW New Mexico State University still maintains the hobbes.nmsu.edu server even though almost everyone there probably has no clue as to what ftp (though most access is through http now) is and probably no idea what DOS or OS/2 is. Every few years they ask for donations and people actually always donate more then what is required so they assign a few students to maintain it. The cost is negligible but the historic value is unimaginable for those looking for old OS/2 and DOS freeware/shareware programs. I don't understand why Duke couldn't do the same for it's Usenet server. Mark

vintagecoder at aol.com wrote: I disagree. I see it as similar. See below. But not everyone has access to a usenet server anymore. If there are any free ones left they are limited or have other problems, like poor retention. My ISP still provides Usenet, but I know a lot of people who's ISP killed their usenet service completely. So Usenet is becoming less available. Yes hobbes is an archive, but there are mirrors so it wouldn't be lost entirely, except for the history of it being one of the first and largest of it's kind. If every provider kills their Usenet servers then the network dies. And Google sucks for Usenet, so don't even go there. Mark

On Sat, 4 Jun 2011, madodel wrote: As Dave McGuire says, he runs a server. There are also news.albasani.net and news.eternal-september.org. Those are good too. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

If they ever did they also do now. Nothing has changed. Servers come and go. Some ISPs have them, some don't. There are several good free ones, and even a usenet newsgroup just for talking about free news servers called alt.free.newsservers. I don't what poor retention means, I guess everybody would define that in his own way. If you use a news client and want articles held for a long time, you are probably going to have to pay for a good server. There are plenty of those still running. You pay for your ISP so why should paying for usenet be objectionable. Ideally it would be free, but... I run my own news server, and judging from the replies to this thread so do several other people. You can do that and control your own retention. It isn't becoming less available so much as it's used less and is becoming a premium service like anything else that has costs associated with it that has people willing to pay for it. Lucky for us who only care about text newsgroups there are several very nice free servers available, some with signup required but still free. There are other very cheap, good servers. You can use these to peer with and retain as long as you want. I hope Hobbes stays around forever and I'm glad to hear there are mirrors. I would be sad to see it go but the data is what matters, and that it's available, not who hosts it. As I said before, that's not true. Usenet is a peering protocol. As long as individuals run usenet servers and peer, usenet stays alive. That is the great thing about Usenet. As far as providers killing it, I think more ISPs will get away from usenet simply because it's a cost to them (administration and DASD) and doesn't have much benefit to most of their customers who don't even know what usenet is. Still there are plenty of pay usenet servers thanks to the people who want binaries so big backbone servers are probably going to be around as long as there's pr0n in the world. True, so true to the extent that I killfile all google groups posts and so do most of the people I know who run their own newsservers.

On Thu, 2 Jun 2011, SPC wrote: All that means is "El Pais" can't fact-check their way out of a wet paper bag. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.simpits.org/geneb - The Me-109F/X Project ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

On 02/06/11 15:55, Dave McGuire wrote: [...] Yes, but how many of those 34k messages are spam messages of some description? (if someone can point me to a decent spam filter or Scorefile for Pan, I'd be most grateful... Usenet suffers greatly from its abysmally poor signal-to-noise ratio...) -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/

On 02/06/11 19:09, Dave McGuire wrote: comp.arch.fpga has been slammed into near oblivion for a while. For extra grins, most of the sci.electronics tree is basically unreadable for all the spam... :( Maybe it's just my Astraweb feed... near-100% completion on binaries, but spammed to hell... -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/

On Thu, 2 Jun 2011, Dave McGuire wrote: Both comp.lang.c and comp.lang.python have a ton of non-spam traffic. (I was going to say "good", but after reading some of it...well....) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.simpits.org/geneb - The Me-109F/X Project ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.