Whoot!

[james_davis_nicoll]

A teen managed to find their way to USENET!

(Immediately killfiles them)

Comments

[dewline]

Sometimes I wonder if I should revisit those corners of the Net...

[lovelyangel]

I think there's some kind of young adult SF mystery / adventure needing to be written around this. Or maybe an Indiana Jones archaeological adventure. USENET. No one nowadays knows how dangerous that place was. 🤔

[ba_munronoe]

I wonder if there are USENET creepypastas, or whether it's too obscure nowadays for the young scamps which write them.

[naomikritzer]

I poked my head into Usenet as a teen but I was 19 and the year was 1992.

[dragoness_e]

Does Usenet still exist? I thought Google ate it and killfiled it.

[(Anonymous)]

Barely. I'm really only still there because it's the only way I'm likely to learn I've outlived someone I deeply dislike.

[brooksmoses]

No, Usenet had (has?) the advantage of being an entirely distributed system across independently-run servers, so it can't get eaten like that.

What Google ate and then disappeared was the DejaNews archive of old-even-at-the-time Usenet posts. They did this in a way that briefly allowed posting to Usenet via Google Groups, but that was just a gateway.

[(Anonymous)]

That intensely annoys me, as someone who used Usenet, then DejaNews, then (briefly) Google Groups. Is there anyone who does have an archive (Internet Archive maybe?) I would like to be able to properly search and cite stuff from the late 80s, early 90s.

Riderius

[davidgoldfarb]

Even the busiest corners of Usenet are pale shadows of what they once were, but it does still exist.

[minnehaha]

How do you even find USENET any more?

K.

[dsrtao]

There's free newsservers for the text-only portions of Usenet. eternalseptember.org is one. individual.net charges ten euros a year.

[minnehaha]

If I had a newsserver, I would be crushingly disappointed to learn that eternalseptember.org is already taken.

K. [thinks surprisingly often of the Good Old Days [tm] in a.f.w.]

[arethinn]

I'm surprised free news servers exist (although not at all surprised at that name, LOL). When my ISP dropped bundled news support uugghhhmmmm more than ten, maybe even fifteen years ago (it was a different ISP than now anyway) and I looked into it, everything was for pay. Not sure I need to add back Yet Another Thing To Keep Up On, but it's tempting...

[jreynolds197]

OT, but Davan over at Something Positive got a copy of the Worst Tabletop RPG Ever:

https://somethingpositive.net/comic/but-why-2/

"You don't play it. You endure it!"

James, did your store ever carry that one?

[james_davis_nicoll]

I think it _just_ predated my store.

[bunsen_h]

Which newsgroups should I be looking in, for snarking purposes? I notice that a self-described biology major has been stupidly annoying in one of the r.a.sf.* groups.

[james_davis_nicoll]

That would be the teen. They are 15.

[(Anonymous)]

I've seem him posting on talk.origins, under another name, since at least 2008. On one thread he maintained, and nobody denied, that he'd been posting since 1995.

He's a fool, and pompous with it, but hasn't the excuse of youth.

Talk.origins is pretty happy with his absence.

William Hyde

[keith_morrison]

I should check up on those Usenet groups. Just to check if some of the assholes I actively despised are dead yet. One can but hope.

[(Anonymous)]

You never really know. Some of the people you probably have in mind no longer post to rasfw, but whether they are breathing or not is another question.

One of the more annoying creationists on talk.origins seems to have died last year. I was surprised at the sense of loss some felt.

William Hyde

[julesjones]

Oh lord. I think I last had a functioning Usenet client two computers ago. I used Google Groups the last few times I briefly looked into afp to see if it was still tumbleweeds. (Turned out that most of the posters were those complaining about where had everyone gone, it wasn't like the good old days with lots of conversation - and were the people that had been repeatedly warned that if they continued to make the group unpleasant by attacking people, people would go elsewhere.)

[ariaflame]

Similar. I had Agent Forté for a while but then I changed OS

[(Anonymous)]

Interestingly, at least one Usenet group has recreated itself on Facebook--rec.equestrian, otherwise fondly known as "Wreck.eq." That said, until the very end the Wreck managed to shine as one of the few groups where trolls had a hard time establishing themselves, primarily because the denizens of the Wreck saw them as fair game for a virtual mock-fest of a party called the Bogbash. There was more to the Bogbash than troll ejection...usually boredom and winter limiting winter equine activities. And there were some epic parties, with and without trolls.

The Facebook version is, alas, rather tame in comparison. But it's a moderated private group. However, we get to see pictures of each other's horses, and occasionally get into heated arguments about the nuances of horse training and husbandry....