On 05/04/13 15:16, John Rumm wrote:
On 05/04/2013 11:14, polygonum wrote:
On 05/04/2013 10:55, Huge wrote:

Well, me too. I like Usenet, for all kinds of reasons, but someone
showed me a depressing graph of traffic analysis for the uk.* groups
(I wish I could find it again! Ah, here we go ...)

http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/spoolstats/

It's not so much the steady decline in volumes, although if continued,
Usenet
will be gone by 2016(*), but the 'number of posters' figures. There
are 40
million people on the internet in the UK and only 1500 of them post to
Usenet? (Actually fewer than that, given that a some of them will be
sock
puppets).

Is there some way we could make Usenet more popular? (Not "Facebook"
popular, but if we could get some new blood in - I suspect most Usenet
users are getting on...) Hmm; Someone's just claimed the first post made
on a Raspberry Pi.

(* Likely before that - if volumes fall too far, the existing providers
will drop out. Still, we could carry on as a hobbyist "service", I
suppose.)


I hate to say it, could there be a DIY-banter style web interface - but
one that did not have all the crap associated with the existing web
interface sites? In fact, simply a recreation of a typical news reader
on a web page.

I have yet to see a web forum that is not a slow horrid thing to use...
it really ought to be possible to do something responsive these days
that allows proper threaded conversations.


course it is, but it requires a real programmer, and I am busy at the moment

I suppose even an email list server could do it these days - it would
not be that onerous to receive a full group feed, and email progs like
TB can do threaded email as well.

No reason we could not have group access built into the FAQ page either
I suppose.

Or a Facebook Usenet page? :-)

Or feed uk.d-i-y into Twitter?

For DIY that can be done in 140 characters... ;-)






--
Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc-ra-cy) €“ a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.