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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3

Term distinctions

Would it be useful somehow to distinguish between Usenet and netnews? Some people use the former term to refer only to "the Big Eight plus alt.*" -- the groups which traditionally have global distribution -- and the latter to refer to the newsgroup medium itself, including regional, local, and bogus hierarchies.

Other things I don't know enough about, but someone might:

  • The biz.* hierarchy and the question of commercial use of Usenet
  • The origin of vendor-specific hierarchies such as vmsnet.* and microsoft.*
  • Bogus groups and what gets propagated
  • Where the hell the group 24hoursupport.helpdesk came from!

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Fubar Obfusco (talk • contribs) 18:11, January 4, 2004 (UTC)

To answer your third point: a wide variety of theories exist among netnews administrators as to how to determine which groups are valid. This is not entirely related to propagation, as most dedicated "transit" servers do not maintain any list of valid newsgroups. (The difference is somewhat complex. Essentially, all netnews software decides which articles to propagate using the Newsgroups header and a set of newsgroup wildcards. Traditional software, INN in particular, associated with each newsgroup in its list of valid groups a list of remote sites which should receive those articles. "Transit-only" software, by contrast, has no mechanism to maintain a list of valid newsgroups, so it simply matches the Newsgroups header against each peer's wildcards. As a result, traditional software would not propagate articles in groups it did not already know about, but transit-only software would, if they matched the peer's subscription wildcards [typically just "*" these days].) Thus, in the strongly-connected part of the Usenet graph, articles are rarely checked for the existence (or spelling) of their newsgroups.
On the "readerbox" side, there seem to be a few different common practices. Some admins will only create or delete groups in hierarchies which have a well-defined administration process and results in cryptographically signed newgroup and rmgroup control messages, possibly augmented by regular checkgroups messages. (That is how I run my servers.) Some admins will execute any newgroup messages they receive, but only signed rmgroups. Some other admins will create any newsgroup name that appears in a sufficient (by their definition) number of messages, regardless of the hierarchy or official process. That is why porn spams are frequently cross-posted to many misspelled newsgroups; the admins of the servers hosting the porn spammers have chosen this approach. --18.24.0.120 06:13, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Re your second point, I can tell you just about everything about the origin of the vmsnet hierarchy, as I was one of the instigators. Briefly a bunch of VMS sites suddenly could get uucp and news access (via DECUS uucp, which I also had something to do with, and ANU NEWS) and we troublemakers wanted more than just comp.os.vms. We decided we wanted to be able to create additional VMS-specific newsgroups without going through the CFD process required within comp. We'd maintain our own servers and links for distributing these groups, too, not relying on others, though we assumed that some of the big sites would want to carry them. We thought there was ample precedent in region-specific groups like sdnet (San Diego) and etc.
It was discussed for awhile in news.something, with a few ridiculing us, and others ridiculing them for trying to tell us what we could and couldn't do with our own machines. I believe the original "request for comments" article, posted somewhere under news., was written by Tom Allebrandi.
As for microsoft., I expect something similar happened there, except that a) I don't think they asked what anyone else thought and b) they didn't so much build a network of old-style news sites carrying microsoft.; rather they set up a master server. Most of their readers were accessing those servers directly rather than expecting local ISPs to carry the microsoft groups. Jeh 06:15, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
Addenda: No, the instigator of the vmsnet hierarchy was Terry Poot -- see http://groups.google.com/group/news.groups/msg/71eeb5d4a0d1cde9?hl=en& . But "Google Groups" can't seem to find his original posts. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jeh (talk • contribs) 06:26, 11 May 2007 (UTC).

IMO This article should be split into two articles, and use a disambiguation page. Half of the sections refer to 'usenet newsgroups' and half of the sections refer to the web of computers that exchanged email, files, and "news" using UUCP back in the early 80's. The article swings back and forth between the two senses of 'usenet'.

Buried in the middle of the article the ambiguity of "usenet" is explained by a 1982 USENIX conference vote to change terminology midstream, dictating that "usenet" would henceforth be pronounced "UUCPNET", but no vote can obliterate the actual historical usage. Ironically, the Wikipedia entry for "uucpnet" redirects to the article on UUCP, at the end of which is a link to the "Usenet Logical Map, July 24, 1984". Apparently not everyone got the memo.

Rather than convert the oldspeak incidents of "usenet" to "UUCPNET" (which would be revisionist and newspeak-y), I think it makes more sense to split this into two articles:

usenet (later known as UUCPNET) and
usenet (earlier known as "usenet newsgroups")

24.5.6.59 08:36, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

A useful way to split would be this article as a description of the medium as it exists today, and everything that came before into a history article. I can see the temptation to split along technologies, but I think that would be a mistake, as the current medium's strengths and weaknesses are directly attributable to its UUCP origins.
An article named "Usenet" describing only uucpnet would be confusing as all hell, because that usage really did die out within a few years. --iMb~Meow 23:05, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Google

The following was recently added to the article.

Google calls their Usenet interface "groups" or "discussions", never referring to "news" or "Usenet" or even hinting at the fact that they're offering an interface to an external service. This has caused many newbies to mistake Usenet for Google's own service. References to "Google" and "Google groups" are thus nowadays commonly found on Usenet, irritating old gurus who generally access Usenet via a dedicated NNTP client instead of a web-based wrapper layer.
As an example, a newbie saying something like "Is there anyone here on this Google group that can help me?" can receive answers along the lines of "We're not on a Google group", or even "There are no such things as Google groups".
This irritation is only strenghtened by the fact that Google's embedded newsreader is very primitive and does not handle threading or even quotation properly.

It has factual errors (a link right off the main groups page explains that it's Usenet--actually looking around a bit, they do point out which are Usenet groups in several places and they include FAQs and glossary to boot--and the view that it's a bad thing is far from universal) and a serious NPOV problem, so I'm leaving it here for now. It's kind of amusing to see NNTP users portrayed as the seasoned old-timers, since there are still some old-timers who believe that NNTP is inferior to reading straight from the spool :) Will fix and re-add soon. --iMeowbot~Mw 05:21, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

On further inspection, these complaints aren't Google-specific at all, just the age-old problem of newbies not reading the instructions Google provided before diving in. In the past, integrated mail-news clients like Pine and Netscape were blamed for the RTFM failure too. i'm going to add something about the clueless newbie phenomenon, but will not be singling out Google alone because it's obviously a more widesperead problem. --iMeowbot~Mw 05:47, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I find Google's quotation system appropriate (but threading seems to be based on the Subject line rather than on the References field).
The confusion between Usenet and Google is likely to increase due to the inclusion of user-created lists or forums in Google Groups Beta, within the same interface (btw, I prefer reading the archive with local Googles like google.fr, although their posting function seems to be broken). I think however the article should not cite Google as the web2news interface "of choice" (although it's legitimate to cite it as the main Usenet archive and search engine). IMHO the article should mention web2news in general and give a few examples, among which Google (pointing out its flaws, like bad threading and absence of XNAYed articles (at least in the non-Beta version)). --Apokrif 09:55, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I was the original author of the text in question. At the time I wanted to point out the problem of newbies mistaking Usenet for Google's internal service, which was evident from people calling newsgroups "Google groups". Now that I've read the comments above, I have realised my comments had errors and their POV was not entirely neutral. But I still feel that the problem of newbies not reading the rules should be mentioned somewhere, perhaps with no specific mention of Google. 85.76.152.179 05:57, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I've cleaned this section "web-to-usenet gateways" up Jan 2007 to be more neutral. Also added a positive note under the points. Might want to put the positive things up top. --BladeMcCool~BMC 04:41, 4 Jan 2007 (UTC)

Why is GOOGLE Usenet still broken, and/or getting orchestrated along by those rusemasters in charge of our private parts? - Brad Guth —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bradguth (talk • contribs) 05:10, July 19, 2007 (UTC)

With the exception of the Google archive (why did I nearly type Deja there?) most of these seem to be to do with binaries, which is a sideline in Usenet. Do we really need dozens of links to binary group searches? It's enough to mention they exist, since [{WP:ISNOT]] a FAQ or how-to. The "guide to posting on Usenet" foe example is binary specific.

Just zis  Guy, you know? [T]/[C] AfD? 09:34, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

If 99.9% of the traffic is a sideline, what to hell is a mainstream??? I don't understand the WP authors. Then they add some obscure binary search engines to the external links, where you can't access the content you find. What shall i do with this? The only resource who offers access is the usenet-replayer web side, which is only here in the discusion part! I suggest to split this article in tree parts Usenet for common technical aspects, Usenet content (textual part) for the textual part of the usenet, where also cound be mention the most of the scocial implications of this article and the historys abount prominent authors, geja and google groups and a third part Usenet content (binary part) describing binary content, tools how to find it, web archives like usenet-replayer and search engines, social implication like the mass spread pornographic content and the copyright problems. Q9a 20:42, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
Ok, now there are two binary postings search engines are stored as external Links. This are both search engines to look, whats there, but you cant access the stuff! Is this SPAM to sell comercial usenet accounts? On the other Hand, the article about [USenet-Replayer], the binary access who i prefer was deleted as SPAM!? Authors shoud think about the question: What information about the describet Item is correct may be most helpfull to the Readers. My english is quite poor, so i hope that there are some Authors on Earth who correct this, because they are not mind loked like - USENET IS A TEXT MEDIA. Q9a 00:58, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
I think any external links should be free, open access and offer something meaningful. Otherwise they should be seen as spam. For example newzbin.com is a commerical entity and with free alternatives, this should come under spam. I also think the links should be listed in order of their usefulness ie. quality of content they provide. --84.9.65.52 17:18, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
I agree with the message above. I dont think newzbin should be removed though due to its significance in creating and popularising the nzb format, but some others will disagree. I deleted one commerical (spam) link and arranged in alphabetical order of their URL so there's no preference. I do believe that readers of this article will find the current external links useful.--Triedandtested 09:57, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
But this is not the point of external links on Wikipedia. It is not some kind of little link directory where people can find neat stuff. It is for linking to factual resources that go deeper into the material than what is suitable for the Wikipedia article, for those readers who have a special interest in learning more. For everything else, there is DMOZ; and we have a link to it. Check it out, there's all kinds of links to services, tools, companies and whatnot there. For more information on Wikipedia's external links policy, please see WP:EL. Haakon 11:42, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
So is groups.google.com excluded from this policy? It seems to be no different to the binary searches listed, except that it indexes text only content. Following your policy it should be removed. Even though I personally find it useful. --Triedandtested 00:39, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Recently, I added CanadianAlien.com to External Links. It was twice removed by administrator HiEv because thought it was done by "Usenet Freedom Fighter spammer" or something which was an erroneous assumption. (I'm still waiting for a retraction and apology btw bc I don't want be called a spammer!) I was acting on good faith and should be given the benefit of the doubt. My site contains summary of hard won knowledge using binary Usenet. I share for benefit of others.

Later, HiEv said link was removed also bc it had ads, and that I shouldn't be posting link myself. Fine. I'll concur these are valid and reasonable policies. But if ads are a point of contention, I expect HiEv and others to review the other external links:

http://www.livinginternet.com/u/u.htm -- Google ad words on right column http://www.usenetnewsgroup.net/ -- ad for 'singles site' on top of page, Google ad words on right column http://www.binaryfeeds.com/ -- Google ad words on top of page, and text ad for NewsParrot Software at bottom of page http://www.how-to-usenet.com/ -- add'l resources page has links to many other sites which are all registered at GoDaddy, look very similar,employ same graphics and all have many ads

Gord1234 20:15, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

A few corrections:
  • I am not an administrator, nor have I ever claimed to be one.
  • I neither thought nor wrote that the CanadianAlien link was added by the "Usenet Freedom Fighter spammer", so I have nothing to apologize for.
  • I did not say that the only reason was ads, merely that this was one part of the reason, and since it is Gord1234's site that is more reason for concern regarding a conflict of interest.
  • The guidelines do not say that external links cannot have any advertising, it says "objectionable amounts of advertising." See #6 in WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided. I'm not sure if your site meets that criteria or not.
Also, you neglected to mention the main reasons I gave for rejecting the link, besides conflict of interest, which were:
  • That Wikipedia is not a collection of links, the article already has quite a few, so it would have to be pretty good and include something not found in other external links.
  • Regarding the topic of Usenet in general, the site had nothing that was not already in the article, because the site mainly focused on trading files on Usenet. See #1 in WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided.
  • Also, because the specificity of the website it was also a poor link for a general article on Usenet. See #14 in WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided.
My other discussions with Gord1234 on this topic can be seen on his talk page and here (where you can see I said the UFF spammer was back and that someone else was adding the CanadianAlien link.) -- HiEv 00:06, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

This being a semi-protected page, I'm not able to add any external links - but I'd like to suggest one: Anchordudes Usenet Newsgroup Service FAQ - http://www.newsgroupservers.net It's been around for about 5 years, includes tutorials and such throughout the site, and includes a pros/cons listing of the major providers. Most importantly, at the bottom of the home page is a cross-reference of who is providing the services for who under what names. Yes, I must disclose, I am one of the Anchordudes, so I am tooting my own horn.

I'd also like to suggest adding Jeremy's FAQ at http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/providers/shopping.html It was originally a simple text page, and he updated it to make it more readable a couple years ago - very readable. It doesn't have as many ancillary articles about how to use the information one finds on usenet, but his buying guide is pretty much spot-on regarding what you need to know to make an informed decision. He doesn't update it as often as the Anchordudes site, but the information is well presented and explained. There are 10 or 15 other sites that have popped up in the past year or so, but they are all copies (if not direct scrapes of text) of Jeremy's or the Anchordudes sites.

Also, the Living Usenet link is dead, at least at this moment.

--Softtop (talk) 08:11, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Creation of newsgroups

Can someone add some information to this article about the process in which newsgroups and hierarchies are created? 24.6.99.30 06:21, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I'll add a link for big-8.org, but a small section on article describing how it varies by hierarchy would also be useful. Vttale (talk) 18:17, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

velveeta = ECP?

Hello. I posted a note on the talk page of velveeta asking about the term's usage with reference to excessive cross posting. Is this Notable? Should it be linked from Usenet? 「ѕʀʟ·✎」 18:14, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't think so; I've never heard the word 'velveeta' used in that manner. My guess is that someone tried to create a special version of 'spam' for Usenet, but 'spam' is still much more commonly used as a colloquialism than any other phrase. VanishingUser 11:56, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, lots of people have [1] Greg Locock (talk) 09:48, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Google groups

The article states: "One of many concerns that have been expressed about the Google interface is that novices may have difficulty realising that they are participating in a Usenet newsgroup rather than in a web forum hosted by Google" Appart from the very concept, does the difference matter? I think that in the article this point is not explained in detail. Thanks in advance. -- Pichote 11:07, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

The difference matters because the possible legal risks are different. 82.131.210.162 (talk) 11:07, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree. Obviously that edit was made by someone who had the complaint personally and it really has no place on an informative site. Google have no reason to tell people they happen to be on news groups because the site functions identically none the less. What should be mentioned is that only stupid people care and it is actually a excellent google feature that allows people to have an easy to use Newsgrouping service --Jimmi Hugh 21:46, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Pot calling kettle black? You think that "people who care are stupid" belongs in the article? VanishingUser 12:06, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
The reason why it is of concern to some people is that Google hides some of the finer points of Usenet, namely etiquette. People coming in from Google with no prior knowledge of Usenet tend to miss pertinent things like FAQs and newsgroup charters. This effectively makes Google an extension of the AOL effect. See AOL#Usenet_newsgroups. VanishingUser 12:06, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Web 2.0

Clearly given how suseptable the stupid, and therefore the general population, are to media bollocs i decided to question this instead of changing it. Clearly saying Newsgroups are similar to Web 2.0 is a statement without meaning. Even if one was to believe that there was any difference in the collaberation online now (apart from the large number of idiots now using the internet) Web 2.0 is not a thing (protocol, platform, library or service) that can be compared to only one of the many "Web 0.5" services. If it was to be compared to a single modern online forum and mentioned that Newsgroups were normally far more productive then the comment would be slightly more meaningful. Despite my comments about Web 2.0 please don't take this as an argument against it even being real, i honestly feel that the comparison doesn't fit any which way. --Jimmi Hugh 21:46, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Jimmi, this makes no sense to me either. The claim in the article, I mean, not your comment! Anybody who thinks "online collaboration" was new to the web with "Web 2.0" (whatever that is) never participated in a web forum site. Or are web forum sites now backdated into "Web 2.0" as well? Jeh 21:30, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I came here to make the same comments. Given that, I'm pulling the buzzword. -- 68.160.163.28 22:46, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Cleanup?

I just cleaned up the references, since references as embedded links require full citation in References (per WP:CITE) and most didn't have them, and I cited "OE misbehavior" which had a "fact" tag. I also moved two items that were listed as references to the top of the "Further Reading" section, since I was unclear about exactly where they were used as references.

However, the article still has the "may need cleanup" tag, so what's left to clean up? I don't see the Usenet article mentioned on the WP:CLEANUP page, and there is no mention here in the talk section of the article needing cleanup around Sept. '06 when the tag was added, so I don't know why that tag is still here. Is there still a reason for the cleanup tag, or can it be removed now? -- HiEv 20:57, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

I've removed the cleanup tag because I can see no need for it and nobody has explained why it is necessary. I did ask Feureau why he added the cleanup tag here almost a month ago, but he did not respond to the question. -- HiEv 07:58, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

uffnet inclusion

Several anon editors have repeatedly added it here (to various other wikipedia pages as well), several registered editors have removed it (every time, on every page to which it's added). Let's consense...I vote non-notable self-promoting spam and not useful per WP:EL even if not. DMacks 05:21, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes it is a link of no notability and little utility. Greglocock 05:46, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

The article was protected from the 13th to the 27th, but as soon as the protection expired the anonymous spammer came back. Anyways, yes, not notable or useful, simply promotional, therefore clear violation of WP:EL, WP:NOT, and WP:LINKSPAM (not to mention WP:3RR with all of the reverts) therefore I oppose inclusion. I've been discussing it with Stephen who protected the article earlier, so we'll see what can be done to block this spam. -- HiEv 17:44, 28 July 2007 (UTC)
Anonymous edits have been blocked again due to the anonymous linkspammer. It was probably just one guy using an anonymizing proxy to get a bunch of different IP addresses. He should be blocked for now. -- HiEv 04:03, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

"any Usenet user has access to all newsgroups"?

I'm not too knowledgeable about usenet myself, but this seems to run against how I understood things (and seemingly contradicts other parts of the article): "However, Usenet articles are posted for general consumption; any Usenet user has access to all newsgroups, unlike email, which requires a list of known recipients." My understanding was that many usenet servers don't offer access to every newsgroup (i.e. "Many sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a limited number of newsgroups.") I guess the first sentence is saying that any usenet user can post to any group (even though they may not be able to receive posts from all groups). If that is the case, maybe the sentence could be made a bit clearer on this point?--Eloil 21:32, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

A usenet user has access to all newsgroups on the server. The server may only carry a subset, but this is a per-server choice, not a per-user limitation. -- Andy Dingley 22:12, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Years ago, I worked with several Usenet servers that had per-group/per-user access controls. Users logged in (username/password). Some newsgroups were available to all users while other groups were only available to subsets of the user population. DMacks 17:44, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

supernews is linked incorrectly —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.5.106.50 (talk) 18:32, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Fixed. -- HiEv 18:27, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Alexandra

Usenet was developed in 1979, not 1980. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eisenbichler (talk • contribs) 04:54, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

The article already says that Usenet was conceived by Truscott & Ellis in 1979, and later says it was established in 1980 "following experiments from the previous year". -- HiEv 11:31, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Lawsuit by RIAA

I do not understand how a lawsuit might be rationally brought against Usenet by RIAA. Usenet is an idea. It would be like suing the ocean. There would be no single point to hit. --Ancheta Wis 11:52, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I assume you're talking about the one that was filed yesterday? RIAA is suing usenet.com, a company that provides Usenet services, not "the usenet discussion system". DMacks 14:17, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Usenet Administrators

I think it's pretty weird that the obscure Kai Puolamäki is listed, but not Spaf's successor, tale (David C Lawrence) or even tale's successor, Russ Allbery (who also is maintainer of the very commonly used Usenet server INN). Kjetilho 05:46, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that is a bit odd. Vttale (talk) 18:17, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Semi-protected

Unfortunately this page is the subject of multiple IPs attempting to spam an external link, and has been semi-protected for a few more months. --Stephen 21:33, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Editing an Existing Usenet FAQ

I'm the author of an existing usenet FAQ. Since writing the original FAQ, my email address has changed. I need to update the original FAQ - is anyone aware of any way for me to do so? I've tried to contact Cindy Tittle Moore, original maintainer of the rec.pets FAQs, but all of her email addresses seem to be bouncing. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks! 69.19.14.40 19:44, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

This is just an article on Usenet... you'd want to contact whoever is hosting the FAQ in question, which I doubt Wikipedia is. --W.marsh 19:48, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

GA Review

This article was quick failed because it did not meet an important criterion. Please see Quick fail criteria. The article must be adequately referenced. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 21:44, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Adequate is an arbitrary term that has no useful definition. At what point is an article ever adequately referenced? When every single sentence has a reference number after it? Few Wikipedia articles ever achieve such a standard. Are in-text links to other wikipedia articles acceptable as references? This article has plenty of supporting links to other articles.
You are the one who "quick-failed" this article, so it is up to you to explain exactly what your problem is with the article, and what you want changed. With your current two-line comment, it is impossible to determine what meaning you are trying to convey. DMahalko (talk) 06:25, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Usenet header compression?

Is header compression a new part of the usenet protocol?

I see that Giganews offers a very small client-side proxy for their servers which will do header compression for any installed newsreader. The newsreader connects to localhost which is then picked up by the local proxy to connect with the Giganews servers.

I believe headers have always been downloaded plaintext and uncompressed. This seems just a ridiculous waste of bandwidth since the Giganews proxy seems to regularly achieve a compression efficiency of 6:1 to 10:1.

Link to the GigaNews Accelerator proxy: http://www.giganews.com/accelerator.html

DMahalko (talk) 13:36, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Newsbin Pro is now supporting a new header compression method, apparently a public domain one: YENC XZVER. So far, it seems that only Astraweb is using it. Until it become more widespread and used by some of the Highwinds services, I'd recommend not adding any reference to it in this WIKI.

--Softtop (talk) 07:25, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Screenshots

Can we get some screenshots of Usenet "Web" sites or whatever the hell Internet pages were called back then before the World Wide Web? It would make the article much better seeing how Usenet sites looked like because most of the article is incomprehensible due to technical jargon.

Alas the Internet of yore was not easy to use nor easy to comprehend. It wasn't sugar-coated with a gooey GUI or flashy Flash animation like the modern web. Pictures were uncommon, and usually the best usenet could do was ASCII art.
The typical "user interface" was a text-only screen, 80 columns wide and 25 columns tall, and very sluggish and slow since it was one of hundreds served up from a central server via a slow serial port connection. Navigation was difficult and hairbrained, either involving memorization of about 40 different special functions each assigned to a different letter of the keyboard, or memorization of 40 different commands to be typed on a command line at the bottom of the screen.
If you think this article is incomprehensible now, trying to include a screenshot of tin along with an explanation of how it was used will only make this article much worse. :-)
DMahalko (talk) 14:22, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Quite possibly. What I'm thinking is that it might be explainable if demonstrated. So how could we explain by demonstration without actually demonstrating? - Denimadept (talk) 14:41, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
It's called "YouTube". DMahalko (talk) 17:04, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Nonono. Unless we can embed video in these articles? Here's an idea: describe modes of communication, such as "conversation" (one to one), "broadcast" (one to many), then describe Usenet as an example of "many to many". That may get the concept across. The technical details are likely not of interest to lots of readers, though they should be included for completeness. Or describe Usenet as a set of discussion groups on any topic one might want to name, including the disgusting and/or silly ones. As to what it looks like, well, it looks like text, like any on-line discussion group is wont to. You can dress up the text all you like, but it's still text. Even binaries are forced into a text format. Different news readers show the text differently, they thread the discussions differently, they show newsgroups themselves differently.... what's it look like?? Jeez. Usenet and web sites are two totally different things with no real intersection. You can find people distributing html (web pages) via Usenet, and you can find things like Google Groups which display Usenet in webpages. Ah, here's a related question in the same way as the original one: What does e-mail look like? - Denimadept (talk) 17:52, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
There weren't "pages". You may be one of those who think the web is the net. What do you find incomprehensible? - Denimadept (talk) 04:46, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Then what did Usenet look like? Doesn't it display something on computer screens? Some sort of browser or application? I know the Web is just a component of the Internet, but I don't know how the Internet is supposed to look like without the Web.
There were and are dozens if not hundreds of such applications, called news readers or news clients, to connect, read, and send to USENET. Mostly different from each other, depending on which operating system they were written for, what sort of interface they have (character cell or graphical) and other variations. - Denimadept (talk) 05:46, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
A bit more detail: USENET by its nature is based on straight text. While binary data can be transferred over it, that's not the original intent. As e-mail is one user to one user, or one user to many users, USENET is many users to many users. - Denimadept (talk) 05:48, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Here's a question for you, anonymous-person-who-doesn't-sign-his-postings: to what sort of audience should this article be aimed? Any time you write something, you need to first keep in mind the audience for whom you are writing. It's very possible, having re-read the intro to this article, that it is in fact written to too high a technical level. So who do we write it for? Total computer illiterates? People over 80? People who might understand Wikipedia? And if that last, what does it mean? The people who wrote this article clearly understand their topic. Well, it's clear to ME but I'm in that group myself. What they may not understand, or not realize they're writing beyond, is the actual audience. So who is that audience, please? - Denimadept (talk) 05:54, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
To the anon. questioner: "what did Usenet look like?" Well, the actual messages looked (and still look) pretty much like plain text email messages as displayed by an email client. In fact a news client on the screen generally looks not unlike an email client, usually with some sort of list of messages (each with date, From, subject line) in one pane, a current message displayed in another pane, and a list of available newsgroups in a third pane; these are all analagous to things you'd see in an email client (messages in current folder, current message, list of folders). The needed displays and controls are similar enough that some email clients (MS's Outlook Express, for one) will also act as news clients, and some news clients (Forte's Agent, for one) will also act as email clients. As for the more general question of "how the Internet is supposed to look like without the Web", "the Internet" is just a transport medium -- a way to get data from one computer program to another. As such "the Internet" doesn't, and never did, "look like" anything in and of itself: It's just a data path connecting a whole lot of computers to each other. Various programs like web browsers, email clients, news clients, FTP clients, IRC clients, etc., etc., each have their own sets of data they access and their own ways of displaying that data. Here's just one example of how things can get even more confusing: Since HTML pages are "just text" and plain text can be sent via Usenet, there's no reason a Usenet article containing HTML couldn't look like a web page if the news client knew how to render the HTML. To my knowledge though this is very rare. Jeh (talk) 10:17, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
There simply weren't any "pages". You made your own "page" locally, through your personal choice of reader. If you go down the screenshot route, then there would have to be screenshots of at least two different readers, showing some sort of contrast. Maybe old-school text Unix system with visible headers, vs. modern GUI-platform reader that infers metadata (likely spamminess etc.) and colour-codes threads accordingly. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:21, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
That would imply that the UNIX-based text interfaces are dead. I just don't think it's practical to include screen shots. - Denimadept (talk) 14:48, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't imply anything, it just gives two different popular ways that people experience USENET. Why isn't it practical? ffm 16:07, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
I said "old-school", not "dead" 8-) Andy Dingley (talk) 17:35, 15 April 2008 (UTC) There is no single "screenshot" of Usenet. If we even considered it, I think there'd have to be three of them - old-school text, "modern" and also web-hosted, just to show that despite their contrasts it's all Usenet underneath. Ideally they'd be reading the same message too.
I expect everyone would start including screenshots of their favorite news reader, start rwars about which is best, etcetera. I realize this is a slippery slope argument, but I really think it'd be better to just figure out how to redo this article to be understandable to a wider audience. I mean, the intro mentions UUCP. Fer gosh sake, WHY?? Don't get into the technical history so quickly. Instead, establish what USENET is first! I think I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. One minute... - Denimadept (talk) 16:39, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Just a note: Per WP:INTRO, the intro should provide a clear and concise description of the topic. ffm 19:12, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
"Clear" includes "understandable" does it not? - Denimadept (talk) 00:44, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I made a small change to the intro tag which will hopefully make the article a little easier for neophytes to start. I broke up the big scarey intro paragraph into a smaller bit, removed "decentralized" as too much info too soon, and left the rest for now.

What I'd like to see a discussion of is how we could make this article as a whole more palatable. Wikipedia, as I understand it, is not aimed at the technology elite. We're tasked with taking the complex subject and making it understandable to those without our amazing </sarcasm> intellect and experience. So, suggestions? Better, BE BOLD and just do it. That is, if we're so bright, figure out a way to write this clearer for a lower-brow audience. - Denimadept (talk) 16:49, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I agree with the original comment that a screenshot of an article in a popular reader would help. While there were certainly notable differences between major readers, the basic feel of reading using fixed width fonts in a fixed 80 column window was relatively consistent for 15+ years. I'd think a shot that communicated the common feature of showing how many unread articles were in a group combined with something like a threading summary pane with an article beneath would be good -- maybe trn or nn. (Personally, I used GNUS, but no longer have regular Usenet access so cannot demonstrate any of them.) One thing that would be interesting to include is that a lot of modern mail UI features have their origins in managing reading of netnews. Vttale (talk) 18:17, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

I think we should use the oldest possible newsreader (rn?) and maybe something like Agent or MT-Newswatcher. The rwar may commence. - Denimadept (talk) 15:09, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Tell you what: I added a screenshot of slrn at the top of the article. It happens to be the reader I use, but it was also the best Usenet screenshot I could find on short notice, clearly showing a threaded article listing, an article, headers and quoting. Discussing how to be fair to all possible Usenet user interfaces is interesting ... but more urgent was to show one of them. The purpose of Usenet must be clearly understandable early in the article, but before my change the top picture was a diagram showing one technical aspect. JöG (talk) 09:07, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for adding a screenshot -- it would be even better if the text in it were readable without clicking through to the whole file . If that's not possible, I'd prefer having the Usenet diagram first because (even though it may be seen as technical) it communicates something clear. Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 23:48, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Add a new row to the average feed size table

I found an update to the average usenet feed size. It s posted on the following page at newsdemon.com: http://www.newsdemon.com/average_feed_size.php

Perhaps we should add a new row to the feed size table? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ksnyder1955 (talk • contribs) 00:53, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Usenet is dead!

In Europe most ISP do not even offer their own nntp server for their subscribers any more and good luck trying to find a non-paying alternative that hosts alt.binaries groups. Other, more meaningful parts of the usenet group hierarchies have also been effectively replaced by web-based forums, e.g. most everybody uses www.index.hu/forum in Hungary.

The audio-visual media pirates have essentially ruined the usenet, taking away much freedom to discuss from the people, becuase most webforums are moderated based on commercial considerations, more strictly than usenet was. Yet, none of this is mentioned in the article. 82.131.210.162 (talk) 11:04, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Of course it's not mentioned: it's opinion, not fact. - Denimadept (talk) 13:48, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
Stated the way the original commenter did, it is pretty clearly opinion; however, some sort of fact-based commentary on the decline of Usenet as the de facto public message exchange system on the global network is probably warranted. Once upon a time Usenet was the killer app for getting computers networked and that era has long since passed, and covering this evolution can be done in a fact-based way. Probably should be in a separate article though, this one is already pretty long. Vttale (talk) 18:17, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
Is the fact that AT&T will, in about a month, end access to Usnet significant? 206.53.192.59 (talk) 13:40, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
That meshes with VTTale's question, IMHO, in the Eternal September article. Perhaps September 1993 will finally end!!! - Denimadept (talk) 18:23, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Let me clarify that a bit. The fewer ISPs that offer free USENET, the fewer clueless newbies will appear. The eternal September, consisting of people who won't, and maybe can't, learn will end. Where, o where, will we get new newbies? Mayyyyybe from the original source: universities, where people can learn and September can end each year! Yes, I know I'm a dreamer. - Denimadept (talk) 15:13, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually the biggest reasons that ISPs are dropping Usenet in the United States is because of the New York attorney generals office and their "war on child porn." They made a bunch of overblown claims (refuted by Giganews) that Usenet contained child porn. He threatened to sue ISPs that didn't actively monitor Usenet for alleged child porn. Since that's nearly impossible and would be very expensive to try (and it would change the nature of usenet) the ISPs dropped the feeds instead of facing huge lawsuits. http://www.giganews.com/blog/2008/09/clearing-air-usenet-abuse-eliminating.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.244.55.86 (talk) 15:52, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

NPOV

Looking at the part about alt.binaries.warez..... It looks like it was written by the mpaa for crying out loud 24.138.61.83 (talk) 04:29, 12 July 2008 (UTC) Evan the god

Usenet censorship by big ISPs?

Someone with adequate knowledge of what's going on needs to address the issue of the telcoms effectively eviscerating free usenet access by their subscribers. My ISP is AT&T and at least 3/4 of the newsgroups -- including ALL the binaries groups -- recently disappeared overnight. Previously, AT&T, as a common carrier (I presume), simply supplied access and had no responsibility for what anyone did with it. Were threats quietly made by those in power? --Michael K. Smith (talk) 04:01, 23 November 2008 (UTC)


This really isn't a WIKI issue, unless one of the administrators feels a new section about "The Future of Usenet" is ever created. In a nutshell, maintaining Usenet servers is expensive because most of the software for doing so is a mish-mash of tools and requires a good bit of hand-on care and feeding. Recent lawsuits attempts by the RIAA and similar groups, while not likely to go anywhere, give greater exposure to liability, since ISP's often have deeper pockets than the premium, stand-alone providers do. And for those that were not hosting in-house, but were instead buying from a provider like Giganews and offering it to their customers, well, there is the outright expense. The final straw was when the NY state attorney general made some specific Usenet newsgroup a topic of investigation, and an independent group of usenet providers developed a universally agreed list of suspect newsgroups, based primarily on their rather obvious names. The ISP's figured this was the ideal time to get out of the game, and leave Usenet to the premium providers. At the same times, nearly all the mainstream premium providers dropped these suspect groups from their servers and stopped peering them.

Is it censorship? Nope - ISP's have no obligation to provide Usenet services. However, if ISP's were to start blocking Usenet ports or otherwise prevent usenet traffic, regardless of its content, THAT might be considered censorship. The jury, hopefully, will never get called in.

There may be a place for the topic in this WIKI, but like I opened with, it would be regarding the future of Usenet, and how the dropping of Usenet by nearly all ISP's may impact overall traffic and the community overall. --Softtop (talk) 07:22, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Man, I was just about to post something similar. It's not (as popular press reports it at times) about preventing access (via normal connections to external providers or via third-party rerouting), merely no longer providing free access as part of their services. As if often the case in commercial situations, decisions are made based on cost/value/ROI. NNTP really is used rarely if at all by most commercial ISP users and USENET does have a poor reputation in certain circles. It would be great to have some WP:RS explaining these changes and tracing the rise and fall of USENET popularity. But we really would need good sources, especially for any analysis of why things are changing. DMacks (talk) 08:25, 24 November 2008 (UTC)


{{editsemiprotected}}


I embeded this comment in an existing section of this discussion up above, but realized upon re-reading some guides that it may be better to start a new section in this discussion so that an experienced editor might see it and decide whether to take any action on it.

This being a semi-protected page, I'm not able to add any external links - but I'd like to suggest one or two:

Anchordudes Usenet Newsgroup Servicer FAQ - http://www.newsgroupservers.net It's been around for about 5 years, includes tutorials and such throughout the site, and includes a pros/cons listing of the major providers. Most importantly, at the bottom of the home page is a cross-reference of who is providing the services for who under what names since so many of the premium providers have been buying each other out. The authors try to stay on top of what's going on in the industry, and were even referenced (woo hoo, kinda) by PCWorld article "Usenet - Not Dead Yet" < http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/151989-2/usenet_not_dead_yet.html> Yes, I must disclose, I am one of the Anchordudes, so I am tooting my own horn.

I'd also like to suggest adding Jeremy's FAQ at http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/providers/shopping.html It was originally a simple text page, and he updated it to make it more readable a couple years ago - very readable. It doesn't have as many ancillary articles about how to use the information one finds on usenet, but his buying guide is pretty much spot-on regarding what you need to know to make an informed decision. He doesn't update it as often as the Anchordudes site, but the information is well presented and explained.

There are 10 or 15 other sites with similar themes that have popped up in the past year or so, but most are all copies (if not direct scrapes of text) of Jeremy's or the Anchordudes sites that simply exist to display advertising.

--Softtop (talk) 06:44, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining the situation. I have added www.newsgroupservers.net, however Jeremy's site says down the bottom that it was last updated March 2000. Are you sure it is still current?
Any chance we can convince you three to write a wikibook about Usenet? We have a basic page here: b:Internet Technologies/Usenet. You could copy and paste your own content, or release it under a free license, which would enable us to convert it to Wiki text and then import it. Just a thought. :-) John Vandenberg (chat) 07:27, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

As I make updates to the Anchordudes site, I'll start building a parallel set of entries for a future wiki. I'm inclined to look at things in the larger venue of the newsgroup page, the usenet page, the newsreaders page (there are actually two in the wiki) and try to get a better integration them all - they all are quite disjointed. It's a large task though - part of the reason I've been lazy about re-organizing the Anchordudes site as well. It will take some time, but I'll be working on it as a parallel project and when I have something useful I'll share it with the community for discussion.

--Softtop (talk) 01:20, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Anchordudes is just another affiliate website that earns cash off referrals. Look at their url strings. Most all of them have query strings attached to the end of the urls. Are you sure you want to list them? HarleyPLO (talk) 04:39, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Usenext?

In certain discussions a kind of Usenet branche named "Usenext" is mentioned. There are several most likely commercial websites dealing with "usenext". But I cannot find any Wikipedia entry on that. I remember having read about a "Usenext taboo" in Wikipedia for some reason (besides Usenext several other topics have been blacklisted there as well). If someone starts an article titled "Usenext" (of any other blacklisted topic) that article has to be deleted immediately. However, Google doesn't find that "Special:" page.

Do I remember correctly? And what ist the reason for this taboo? Why shouldn't there be any encyclopedical information about Usenext?

And, by the way, what exactly IS Usenext?--SiriusB (talk) 14:12, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

There was an article at UseNeXT, and an identical copy at Usenext, which was deleted in early 2007 for being, well, junk - it was a page on a specific commercial usenet provider by that name, which was mostly an argument about various "controversies" relating to it, etc. There is no "blacklist" I can find, beyond the fact it doesn't look like a particularly meaningful topic on which there can be enyclopedic information - it's a single company! Shimgray | talk | 15:03, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Capitalization: USENET or Usenet?

Is it "USENET" or "Usenet"? The article uses both capitalizations, and doesn't seem to cover which is correct or preferred.

It was USENET when first announced, but by far the usage standard became Usenet. Vttale (talk) 18:17, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
I've always liked "UseNet", but "Usenet" is what I see most often. .`^o Painediss`cuss o^`. 19:13, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
I would agree that by now it's settled down as "Usenet" (cf/ Unix). Shimgray | talk | 19:19, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
Agreed. The article itself needs to explain that, although starting as USENET, it becamse Usenet over time. I shouldn't have to come and find the explanation here. -- Ralph Corderoy (talk) 18:25, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Incomprehensible

The article is incomprehensible. It never explained the meeaning of usenet in a meaningful way. It says users and network.??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.124.230.149 (talk) 09:58, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

More ISP's discontinue Usenet access

Some providers that had previously curtailed Usenet access have since discontinued it altogether. Someone tacked a line on to the end of the last paragraph in section 3.0 History to the effect that AT&T had done that, so I added another line for Verizon, which has done the same. --96.251.14.5 (talk) 22:16, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Effective June 30, 2010, Cox Communications will discontinue Usenet service to our subscribers. Rcgldr (talk) 12:59, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Wildmat dubious

The article claims 

(Note: the asterisks are used as wildmat patterns, examples follow in parentheses)

Is this a specific convention or is it just an analogy? Notably, the "*" is used in the same meaning in a number of other contexts, including the far better known Bourne-family of shells. Seeing that wildmat appears to be a side-player (which I have previously never heard of) the claim seems inappropriate and misleading. 188.100.206.102 (talk) 06:56, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

According to the wildmat article, that is a specific library that is based on the pre-existing ideas and syntaxes of shell wildcard and that it's the actual one used in one or more specific pieces of software involved in Usenet. However, the key for the article here is the idea of the wildcarding, regardless of its implementation details in some relevant situations. And it's more useful to reader to learn that idea (or they may even already know it, as it's standard in other fields far removed from Usenet) rather than an overly specific (and viewed as limited-application) one. It would be more useful for the article here to use the word "wildcard" instead of "wildmat", and link it to wildcard or Asterisk#Computer interfaces. DMacks (talk) 07:15, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
Agree. Jeh (talk) 19:29, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
Agree too - wildcard is sufficiently generic and non computer-specific to make sense to most people. If any computer related reference is to be made, it should be to glob Glob_(programming), not wildmat. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.57.52.21 (talk) 10:04, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
Agree too ... too. The term "wildcard" in near-universally known, and I think that wildcard would be more appropriate considering that subgroups are not completely set in stone and (although not likely) could be different throughout newsgroups. 72.88.38.242 (talk) 21:57, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to be a bit bold and remove the attempt to explain entirely – let the reader see from context and examples that alt.* means "anything in the alt hierarchy. JöG (talk) 07:53, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Usenet closed?

Word on the street is that Usenet closed it's doors as of may 2010. Article related: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Duke-University-Usenet-Server-Newsgroups,news-6847.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.159.88.98 (talk) 16:38, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

According to our Usenet page, the system is not centrally hosted at Duke, but rather a distributed network in which many different machines all have a copy of the data. The article you cite merely says that one such server is being shut down. If my local library closes, that doesn't mean I can't read books, I just go to a different library that has the books. DMacks (talk) 16:45, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

New RFCs

There are two new RFCs for Usenet, RFC 5536 - Netnews Article Format and RFC 5537 - Netnews Architecture and Protocols.--67.183.239.138 (talk) 05:48, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Name's Relation to Hungarian?

Does the name Usenet derive in any way from the Hungarian "üzenet" meaning "message"? If so, maybe a pertinent addition to the article? Chconnor (talk) 21:52, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

I very strongly doubt it -- it's kind of a quasi-abbreviation of "User Network" with allusion to USENIX (which in turn was influenced by DECUS), etc. AnonMoos (talk) 16:41, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

There's actually a Wikipedia article on Alex Martelli, but apparently linking to that article (or even discussing such a link on Talk:Alex_Martelli), would be a BLP violation... AnonMoos (talk) 16:41, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

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