夜神 岩男 wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-07-18 at 10:54 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 7/18/2011 10:27 AM, 夜神 岩男 wrote:
>> >
<snip>
>> > So... what is wrong with newsreaders? In my experience the provide all
>> > the benefits of email (speed, uniform interface, etc.) that you listed
>> > as well as all the benefits of a post/fetch paradigm that I get from
>> > forums without any of the hassles of either.
>>
>> Interesting that you bring this up in the context of spam. The problem
>> with net news is that all of the servers stopped handling it because of
>> the porn and copyright-infringing binaries postings that overwhelm it.
>
> Newsreaders require a news server. News servers can be run by anyone, it
> doesn't require a global cabal to serve news. In the later days of
> usenet it was overwhelmed by crap, largely because of the enormous
> number of groups created by people who didn't have time to maintain
> them, had a blanket anonymous publish policy, and eventually never
> showed back up to take care of their lists. Lists such as that got
> swamped, and so did the servers, which made the whole system unweidly
> (though news server networks are still run today and moderation via user
> validation is still an option).
The beginning of its downhill slide, IMO, was when AOL got on. I remember
that happening: AOL auto-subscribed *all* its users to certain newsgroups,
and for some utterly clueless reason, that included alt.best.of.internet.
I occasionally dipped into that group, and the flamewars started then,
with idiots announcing that they could post anything they wanted, anywhere
they wanted. That, and the Green Card Spam, where K&S proclaimed that
there was no such thing as "community", that it was all the wild west.
>
> What I am describing is the running of a newsgroup server specific to a
> project or interest, say news.centos.org (or whatever for whatever).
A big eight newsgroup, moderated, is what this sounds like. Let me note
that if you want, I can point you to a quite good robomoderator: it
approves regular posters, checks new for on-topic, and if it can't make up
its mind, forwards it to designated human moderators.
<snip>
mark