It's always fun to realize that USENET is still out there humming along. I still remember the thrill of working on my ancient Delphi/Object Pascal projects, and posting questions... waiting a few hours and checking back for responses. There was no "instant gratification" in those days. (I wasn't really using IRC).
Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I always assumed would eventually happen. The group names alone are truly unhinged. The Wild West is still.... wild!
Yup, in the 2005ish era, I found that I was downloading albums just because I could. Some I never even listened to! I got rid of my EasyNews subscription because it all seemed so silly to me.
I ran the tech side of the most popular independent ISP in Chicago (I guess they were mostly all independent back then) in the mid-late 1990s, and Usenet was the biggest nightmare we had to deal with. We were solid at it, too (Freenix-ranked, independently worked out the INN history cache, &c). Nothing we did had more fussy hardware associated with it.
The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
My experience in the 1990s was that that was a very excellent way to get all the Usenet users in your userbase to switch to some other ISP, which in turn meant there was little reason to waste all the energy on Usenet if you were going to do that, which contributed to the centralization of Usenet, a system that did not make sense once centralized and that subsequently collapsed into a shitty P2P piracy network.
Usenet archives have helped me tremendously. For example, I'm looking for info on an old (non-xenix) Unix for the apple Lisa and it gave me a name (and after a bit of digging, an address) of someone who was trusted with the remaining stock after the company that made it went under
I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.
As I said, the user interface is awkward. You need to select the "Content" checkbox when searching for Posts. E.g. to search for "deadlock" within comp.lang.tcl, start with https://usenetarchives.com/index.php?s=deadlock%20ingroup:co...
then select "Content", unselect "Author" and "Subject" and click "Search".
Usenet was great in the late 90s and early 2000s. I posted a lot, and met some great people. I got a job doing tech review of books about WAP and WML from my posts in a group about the forerunner to mobile internet, and another job with a company making intranet software from some posts about ASP and vbscript. I've no idea where I'd go for that sort of forum today.
https://eternal-september.org/ last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.
Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.
Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.
Little bit of both. From my own anecdata, most people I knew left usenet due to spam problems. Most of the people who did not were primarily the ones using it for binaries. And then yes, the binary angle started the trend where ISPs stopped offering it altogether, which even further reduced the likelihood that people would use it.
And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries
I grew up with BBS access for a number of years, but no USENET access.
When I finally got access to USENET ... what a terrible place it was! SO MUCH SPAM.
And the few newsgroups not riddled with spam just had poor behavior. The nice thing about BBS conferences were they were all moderated. And the ones I was part of required you to use your real name (as verified by the BBS sysop). They took it seriously - if a sysop was found not to be compliant, his BBS was kicked out of the network for a period of time.
The only good thing about USENET was the tooling (news readers, etc). Otherwise, both early web forums and BBS's had it beat.
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
Usenet is a system so bad that "posting a message on a Usenet server and having it appear on other servers in a few seconds" sounds like an achievement. And: both those other systems have reliable ways to see all the new messages on a thread, unlike Usenet, which couldn't even guarantee that you'd see all the messages, let alone in order.
I was a Usenet systems engineer (regional ISP operator, INN hacker) during the heyday of Usenet, and a dedicated user in that time as well. These rose-tinted views of how well Usenet worked don't fly for me at all. Reddit is actively, materially, multifariously better than Usenet, and Reddit is not the state of the art.
sadly the alts were a bit of a mixed bag. the root problem was that anyone could issue a control message to create a new alt group. which I verified personally. because of that intermediate nodes would choose not to download updates. partially because it was a cesspool, and largely because because bandwidth was quite limited and that's where all binaries were distributed. so alt groups had spotty distribution, which is reflected in the archives.
Does anyone know if this is still the most comprehensive archive? I'd like to know if the owner found any of the missing 91-01 datasets or if they are available anywhere.
weird, it seemed like the search index didn't go back past 2003. And then I tried a few more searches and found some hits. So I guess the index is a little spotty?
But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.
I'm sorry, it's only for people I know personally. Also, it only holds minor Usenet hierarchies like the vestigial dk.*.
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
Does anything happen in the dk. hierarchy anymore. Last time I check, probably 10 years ago, it was either spam or one crazy person.
It's a bit of a shame, I really want something like dk.city.copenhagen and dk.city.copenhagen.noerrebro to replace Facebook groups. That's probably never going to happen, it's seems like a missed opportunity.
Me too, but not for usenet. The server-to-server protocol is a low ceremony, high observability, standardised and battle-proven gossip-flood protocol with hierarchical channelisation and robust mature tooling, ideal for eventually-consistent distribution of telemetry and control messages over a node mesh of uncertain reliability up to global scale. What's not to like?
Seems to have patchy coverage in the places I was looking, and date range search wasn't working for me. OTOH, I think I found some posts not archived by Google...
Usenet must be a generational thing, because it was not widely available or used when I was in university. We were all concerned with if we were allowed to torrent content and how strict they were with enforcement. I recall friends on some campuses had very strict policies where two strikes could mean you had no internet service in the dormitory for the remainder of the year.
Google has had memory loss. I was on usenet in the early 80's and when Google took over, I had fun reviewing my posts. Probably 10 years ago (more or less), I did the search again and the earliest post was sometime in the 90's. Very sad that they lost all those posts (not just of mine, but surely there are many more they lost).
EDIT: and in this specific archive, the earliest post of mine is 2003!
Especially annoying because if I remember correctly people gave Google some irreplaceable backup tapes on the promise that there'd be a complete archive, and within a couple of years it'd turned into Google Groups...
It's always fun to realize that USENET is still out there humming along. I still remember the thrill of working on my ancient Delphi/Object Pascal projects, and posting questions... waiting a few hours and checking back for responses. There was no "instant gratification" in those days. (I wasn't really using IRC).
Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I always assumed would eventually happen. The group names alone are truly unhinged. The Wild West is still.... wild!
It's used for piracy a lot still.
Yup, in the 2005ish era, I found that I was downloading albums just because I could. Some I never even listened to! I got rid of my EasyNews subscription because it all seemed so silly to me.
the alt.devilbunnies vs alt.pave.the.earth "wars" kept me sane as a teenager. I miss the old internet.
I remember the epic flame wars with a certain game developer (who I wont name so as not to create drama here) whose starship simulator had a few bugs.
Usenet is the main reason I started my own ISP in ’93: to have a reliable USENET feed. I loved it then, and I love it now.
Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
Similar! And for a while my back bedroom in London was one of the world's top USENET 'transit' nodes, getting as high as ~#6 IIRC!
I ran the tech side of the most popular independent ISP in Chicago (I guess they were mostly all independent back then) in the mid-late 1990s, and Usenet was the biggest nightmare we had to deal with. We were solid at it, too (Freenix-ranked, independently worked out the INN history cache, &c). Nothing we did had more fussy hardware associated with it.
The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
(I loved Usenet, but also: good riddance.)
it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
Which is why most of us stopped carrying the binary hierarchy[1] way, way before Usenet 'died'.
My experience in the 1990s was that that was a very excellent way to get all the Usenet users in your userbase to switch to some other ISP, which in turn meant there was little reason to waste all the energy on Usenet if you were going to do that, which contributed to the centralization of Usenet, a system that did not make sense once centralized and that subsequently collapsed into a shitty P2P piracy network.
Usenet archives have helped me tremendously. For example, I'm looking for info on an old (non-xenix) Unix for the apple Lisa and it gave me a name (and after a bit of digging, an address) of someone who was trusted with the remaining stock after the company that made it went under
This is what the internet used to be about, just people ... connecting with people, without all the hassle of big business in the way.
I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.
Where are you seeing full-text search for groups? I can filter the post titles on the current page of listings, but this is completely useles...
As I said, the user interface is awkward. You need to select the "Content" checkbox when searching for Posts. E.g. to search for "deadlock" within comp.lang.tcl, start with https://usenetarchives.com/index.php?s=deadlock%20ingroup:co... then select "Content", unselect "Author" and "Subject" and click "Search".
> it seems greatly improved
With 1990's style age "verification" to boot.
I am thrilled to announce that none of my old UseNet stuff seems to be there.
<whew />
I found a few of my posts from 1997, am glad none of them were too cringe.
Usenet was great in the late 90s and early 2000s. I posted a lot, and met some great people. I got a job doing tech review of books about WAP and WML from my posts in a group about the forerunner to mobile internet, and another job with a company making intranet software from some posts about ASP and vbscript. I've no idea where I'd go for that sort of forum today.
It's so disappointing that we could have had Usenet, but instead have centralised/corporate/ad/spyware invested Facebook/Reddit/Xitter/Tiktok.
https://eternal-september.org/ last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
spam murdered it.
It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.
Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.
Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.
Spam fell off drastically after Google Groups disconnected from Usenet a couple of years ago.
Binaries killed Usenet, not spam.
Little bit of both. From my own anecdata, most people I knew left usenet due to spam problems. Most of the people who did not were primarily the ones using it for binaries. And then yes, the binary angle started the trend where ISPs stopped offering it altogether, which even further reduced the likelihood that people would use it.
And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries
This.
I grew up with BBS access for a number of years, but no USENET access.
When I finally got access to USENET ... what a terrible place it was! SO MUCH SPAM.
And the few newsgroups not riddled with spam just had poor behavior. The nice thing about BBS conferences were they were all moderated. And the ones I was part of required you to use your real name (as verified by the BBS sysop). They took it seriously - if a sysop was found not to be compliant, his BBS was kicked out of the network for a period of time.
The only good thing about USENET was the tooling (news readers, etc). Otherwise, both early web forums and BBS's had it beat.
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
> Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds.
To be fair, that's probably because it's now a lot more centralized than it was intended to be.
Usenet is a system so bad that "posting a message on a Usenet server and having it appear on other servers in a few seconds" sounds like an achievement. And: both those other systems have reliable ways to see all the new messages on a thread, unlike Usenet, which couldn't even guarantee that you'd see all the messages, let alone in order.
I was a Usenet systems engineer (regional ISP operator, INN hacker) during the heyday of Usenet, and a dedicated user in that time as well. These rose-tinted views of how well Usenet worked don't fly for me at all. Reddit is actively, materially, multifariously better than Usenet, and Reddit is not the state of the art.
Huh, where is alt.2600?
sadly the alts were a bit of a mixed bag. the root problem was that anyone could issue a control message to create a new alt group. which I verified personally. because of that intermediate nodes would choose not to download updates. partially because it was a cesspool, and largely because because bandwidth was quite limited and that's where all binaries were distributed. so alt groups had spotty distribution, which is reflected in the archives.
Does anyone know if this is still the most comprehensive archive? I'd like to know if the owner found any of the missing 91-01 datasets or if they are available anywhere.
Is there an easy way to grab messages/threads? I would like a copy of my own posts.
archive.org has usenet archives (in gzipped mbox format). Not exactly an "easy way" if you want threads, of course.
weird, it seemed like the search index didn't go back past 2003. And then I tried a few more searches and found some hits. So I guess the index is a little spotty?
But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.
I easily found one from 1999:
https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=dk.edb.programmering....
I found some of mine from 1992
comp.lang.java seems to go all the way back to 1995. Maybe depends on the group?
I found a few of my old posts from 1997
/me is still running an NNTP server…
hmmm, interesting. .... address? Can I get an account?
I'm sorry, it's only for people I know personally. Also, it only holds minor Usenet hierarchies like the vestigial dk.*.
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
Does anything happen in the dk. hierarchy anymore. Last time I check, probably 10 years ago, it was either spam or one crazy person.
It's a bit of a shame, I really want something like dk.city.copenhagen and dk.city.copenhagen.noerrebro to replace Facebook groups. That's probably never going to happen, it's seems like a missed opportunity.
https://eternal-september.org/
Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).
Me too, but not for usenet. The server-to-server protocol is a low ceremony, high observability, standardised and battle-proven gossip-flood protocol with hierarchical channelisation and robust mature tooling, ideal for eventually-consistent distribution of telemetry and control messages over a node mesh of uncertain reliability up to global scale. What's not to like?
if nothing else, it's much more usable than the google news archives.
Seems to have patchy coverage in the places I was looking, and date range search wasn't working for me. OTOH, I think I found some posts not archived by Google...
how much coffee does my guy need lol. Can't read a page without a request for additional caffeine
A good NNTP server is one of the few services I'd be willing to pay for on the modern internet, though. (Emphasis on good)
If you don't need binaries, eternal-september.org isn't too shabby.
Usenet must be a generational thing, because it was not widely available or used when I was in university. We were all concerned with if we were allowed to torrent content and how strict they were with enforcement. I recall friends on some campuses had very strict policies where two strikes could mean you had no internet service in the dormitory for the remainder of the year.
Other than the nicer UX, is this different than the large archive in groups.google.com ?
Google has had memory loss. I was on usenet in the early 80's and when Google took over, I had fun reviewing my posts. Probably 10 years ago (more or less), I did the search again and the earliest post was sometime in the 90's. Very sad that they lost all those posts (not just of mine, but surely there are many more they lost).
EDIT: and in this specific archive, the earliest post of mine is 2003!
Especially annoying because if I remember correctly people gave Google some irreplaceable backup tapes on the promise that there'd be a complete archive, and within a couple of years it'd turned into Google Groups...
Fuck I sounded so fucking pompous in 1984. I mean fuck.
We all did.
impressive, thank you.
Very cool to see and play around with! Wonder if it'll have a small resurgence as http(s) continues to shit the bed with SEO slop and scrapers.
censored
The site wants my birthday, so I guess I will not be visiting it :(
Just make one up?
So give it someone else's birthday instead.