Usenet Computer YArchive | Hacker News Reader

Usenet Computer YArchive

yarchive.net

96 pointshaimez25 comments

I really miss USENET of the good ol' days (pre-AOL escaping its garden) .. it was one of the most vivid and energising resources on the Internet. I guess its still out there, ticking away, but I haven't personally fired up an nntp reader in years.

I would, though, if there were to be some sort of USENET revival. Actually I guess there is no reason not to .. but last time I checked, it seemed pretty dead.

These days, sites like HN and reddit seem to fill the need - at least, its possible to get a similar vibe. But I wonder if there will ever be a case for the revival of the whole nntp distribution mechanism - or if its more feasible to use the same set of technologies for lesser, more local, kinds of content distribution.

The D language uses NNTP based forums:

http://forum.dlang.org/

What you're seeing there is a web interface to NNTP. You can also use any newsreader to participate in the forums. (I usually use Thunderbird.)

Vibe.d as well: http://forum.rejectedsoftware.com/

The code is also available. I always wished more forums could do this. They're not really posting on usenet, just hosting their own servers basically. Sadly not a lot of new options for NNTP clients either. Usenet is one of my favorite techs next to IRC. Though I understand IRC more than Usenet.

It's just hard to beat NNTP as a reliable, efficient protocol. It's also amenable to this:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.ht...

Which is a read-only version of the messages that I wrote a simple program to generate from the NNTP database.

POVray does this too, but it's not part of UUnet, just a self hosted nttp group.

For anyone not immediately understanding what this website does...

"These are articles I've saved from Usenet newsgroups (and a few from web forums). The vast majority of these articles were posted by people who have a well-deserved reputation for a high level of accuracy."

These appear to be from the 1990s mainly. They are very good but there was a lot of good stuff from the late 80s as well - many happy memories of reading posts by from John Mashey, Eugene Miya and Henry Spencer etc.

On an side, I understand that Vernor Vinge's book A Fire Upon the Deep was inspired in part by the Usenet of the 80s.

Don't forget my 1980's Usenet search engine: http://www.dejadejadeja.com/

Also I downloaded all Usenet from 2003-2013 (800GB of stuff) and Archive.org have that now (I sent it to them on a 1TB drive).

Another archive of Usenet:

http://olduse.net/

This is the type of site which is a really interesting idea but finding it half-way through sucks somewhat :(

Archived, put into archive.org

I miss dejanews, Google screwed that up.

Logged in on my phone to upvote; Google Groups is terrible and feels abandoned.

One of my favorite sites, I got his permission years ago to keep a mirror.

I wonder if this isn't already covered by archive.org ... (And if not, why not? They collect so many other things.)

Norman Yarvin's contribution is to pull these good articles out of years of discussions which he followed, usually taking them out of threads with many comments and varying subjects, and to present them sorted by subject matter. It would take a huge amount of effort to duplicate that. Sure, you could find these articles with a search on some archive, but they would be found among thousands of hits of, putting it very mildly, rather lower value. Yarchive is a very valuable site.

Usenet archives used to be covered by Google Groups, I assume they dropped it when being good was no longer paramount.

Pretty sad that your post was downvoted, since while Google haven't dropped Usenet entirely (I wish they would, and hand it to someone who gives a shit about it), they have gone out of their way to make a once useful service as unusable as possible.

Go to groups.google.com in the early days and you got the Usenet archive. Go now (and for many years), and you get this:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview

Where's the Usenet archive there?

Furthermore, Google is a significant reason why many people deserted Usenet over the last decade or so, as it provided via Google Groups a gateway for posts that were almost exclusively troll, abuse or spam (or, at best, clueless Googlers (like AOLers of the past) who didn't know they were posting to Usenet, or what Usenet is) and Google completely ignored pleas by people in the Usenet community to stop the abuse.

Edit: Funny, after making this post, after trying to find (via Google) examples I knew of people on Usenet complaining about Google, I now do another Google search and I'm greeted with a captcha, due to "unusual traffic from your computer network".

I don't wanna get all conspiratorial, but it's still creepy as hell.

No, Groups still contains USENET archives, ported from the DejaNews acquisition, I believe. I have searched for my earliest posts as a first year undergraduate in 1991 and they are all there, for instance.

That's very good to hear. It pains me to not being able to access archives.

FYI, the URLs for USENET look like this, with the name of the group you want substituted for 'alt.silly-group.radish-therapy' which is an alternative hierarchy group I proposed, that was created in 1992 and is still ... going, at least, in some sense of the word:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.silly-group.radi...

I've archived yarchive.net, and put it into archive.org with a note to someone to integrate it into the Wayback Machine.

archive.org has copies of the various Usenet archives, but doesn't have a specialized UI for viewing the data as threaded postings in groups.

http://xach.com/naggum/articles/ and http://xach.com/rpw3/articles/, for people interested in Lisp.

Does this similar to http://textfiles.com/

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