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 mine here! I'll cede it to someone with the better online claim but only if you can prove you're not a Fudd in disguise.
Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
(I loved Usenet, but also: good riddance.)
Which is why most of us stopped carrying the binary hierarchy[1] way, way before Usenet 'died'.
With 1990's style age "verification" to boot.
<whew />
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
To be fair, that's probably because it's now a lot more centralized than it was intended to be.
Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).
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.
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.
But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.
https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=dk.edb.programmering....
EDIT: and in this specific archive, the earliest post of mine is 2003!
