"Tom Watson" wrote in message
...
There seems to be a trend towards taking Usenet out of the features
typically bundled with ISP services.

I have Comcast which farms their Usenet stuff out to GigaNews and that
works fine except when Comcast has a problem. As many have noted,
when you contact Comcast Tier 1 support for a Usenet problem they
don't even know what newsgroups are.

It looks to be the case that binaries will go first but there may
ultimately be a reduction or elimination of all Usenet service through
ISP's.

I wonder if that is all bad.

Some guys I talk with think that the Golden Age of newsgroups ended
when AOL started in. I don't know; I was on CompuServe then.

Some hardcore types even think that the best days were before Gene
Spafford organized The Backbone Cabal that lead to The Great Renaming
in '87.

I don't know about that and I'm not going to get medieval about it and
start looking for my Hayes 1200 baud Smartmodem either.

The point is that the ease and transparency of access to newsgroups
may have contributed to the influx of the ignorati.

The corollary might be that an increase in the difficulty of obtaining
access, whether by necessitating a specialized provider, or by
reintroducing certain technical challenges to gaining access, might
reverse the trend and diminish the number of knuckleheads on Usenet.

Maybe it would be good to pay a few bucks a month to get newsgroups -
and maybe they should make setup and configuration sufficiently
challenging as to act as rough justice sort of bozo filter.

It's an interesting concept.


That sound good in theory Tom. But one of the big problems with newsgroups
is that an ancient group of dinosaurs determine if anybody gets to make a
new one. We are basically stuck with what we got.

I worked with a number of individuals to create a new newsgroup once, It was
a descent into hell. You have to "prove" the existence of a "need" of the
new newsgroup. And a poll is taken of present newsgroups with all the
spammers and bozos. They are living in another universe. And do not care
about the present dysfunctionl state of things.

Until which newsgroups can be created and in some fashion filter out the
bozos, there isn't much hope for a viable alternative to the present
situation.