MinJungKim.com Braindump v 6.0 Gah. I’m still doing this?

Nostalgia

Prompted by discussions the other night at Tantek’s, I’m extraordinarily nostalgic for good ol’ Usenet.

Before it got shitty.

And by shitty, I’m not referring to the flame wars, haxxors, and crap like that. I mean before the spam beyond belief that flooded servers, became massively distributed, and forced everyone else to flee the communities there.

Mind you, I haven’t read/posted/lurked on newsgroups for about 3 years now.
If you looked hard enough on Google, you’d find some posts, bad poetry, and thoughts on Miso Soup in the archives that *cough* dejanews used to put out there. (Oh man.. going back to 1995)

Wondering:
a) Are people still active in usenet? Favorite groups? Worth going back?
b) Best newsreaders for Usenet if I wanted to try heading back there?
c) I used to work for and subscribe to Supernews. My current ISP offers free accounts with Giganews. Are these still the best sources for supplementary Usenet subscriptions should I be so inclined?
d) Do the newsreaders out there…or perhaps on some backend nntp server administration side…do they have any sort of spam filtering in place?

I’m wondering if there’s anything out there for Usenet that is similar to group/collaberative spam filtering that Cloudnet’s Spamnet which uses membership based feedback to more accurately identify and filter out spam.

Is it Worth it to bother trying to “TAKE BACK USENET” in that whole 80s sort of “Take Back the Streets” campaign?

Thoughts?

Yeah I remember the USENET. Back BEFORE the WEB when I was an undergrad at USC, there was only the USENET. When the only people online were government people, and college students. We got pissed when AOL invaded the USENET.

I would love to have that back.

i blew off newsgroups about 3 years ago as well. they used to be the only viable support option for most audio software, so i was pretty much using them by neccesity.
when i read yer post i had a moment of….oh yeah, i remember reading that crap every single day, and downloaded thunderbird
( http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ ) so far it seems pretty cool. thanks for contributing to my information overload.

usenet was so wonderful, 10 years ago. I haven’t used it in about 3 years. I remember when you could just start talking to anyone you met online, and everyone was pretty much sometype of geek or academic. The conversations were real, the signal was stronger than the noise, and the masses weren’t here so the marketers hadn’t arrived yet.

ah, memories.

If you look hard enough, there are still some good newsgroups out there. I’ve visited alt.marketing.ebay from time to time for discussion on how to write effective listings, dealing with non-payment, etc. The posters there jealously guard it against spammers, as I found out one day when I accidentally posted an auction announcement that was meant for alt.marketplace.online.ebay and had my Yahoo! Mail account yanked as a result. Oops.

a) some people do, I stopped around 1995. I think I stopped posting to the public USENET when I took over corporate newsmaster work, I had too many questions to answer on internal newsgroups and couldn’t keep up with even them. That’s about the time I gave up chasing down fraudulent spam. I remember the days when I could get them to stop by being sufficiently threatening.

b) the last one I actively used was strn, which did scoring based on a complex bunch of criteria… it can be very effective at getting rid of spam and making posts you can see rise to the top. I wish I had a mail reader with the same functionality. Mozilla is okay, you can now post through google groups…

c) haven’t posted since ‘95… do be careful to set your headers so your posts won’t be archived if you don’t want them to be. Google also allows you to delete embarassing old messages.

d) see strn, Mozilla might. You can set up your NNTP feed to automatically delete messages that are crossposted to some number of too many groups, and strn can do the same thing. There are all sorts of things you can do. Personally, I think the best answer is to only read PGP signed messages like some of the newsmaster facilities do, or S/MIME in the real world… but nobody is really spending that much energy on USENET these days, maybe whatever yucky trusted server signing solution yahoo and microsoft come up with for email will be expandable to USENET.