Huge writes:

On 2013-04-05, polygonum wrote:
On 05/04/2013 08:41, Huge wrote:
On 2013-04-05, Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artÃ*culo , Petter Gustad
escribió:

Great! I hate to use all those web based forums.

+1

It's so inefficient to
point, click, type, paste, and copy in the browser.

And you can't killfile idiots and trolls.

I agree, but Usenet is dying.

(


Not for another year - paid my Berlin sub the other day. :-)

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.)


In short, revive the UUCP stuff (does it need reviving, or are there
not still a few dedicated old-timers?) to once again carry Usenet over
dialup links (which are more than fast enough for the text-based NGs
though certainly not for the binary ones).

I'm pretty sure I still have some of the old software for that, kicking
around here somewhere...... Yes, here's part of the README for uucp-1.05 :-


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This package is covered by the Gnu Public License. See the file
COPYING for details. If you would like to do something with this
package that you feel is reasonable but you feel is prohibited by the
license, contact me to see if we can work it out.

WHAT IT IS

This is the complete source code for a Unix UUCP package. It provides
everything you need to make a UUCP connection. It includes versions
of uucico, uusched, uuxqt, uux, uucp, uustat, uulog, uuname, uuto,
uupick, and cu, as well as uuchk (a program to check configuration
files), uuconv (a program to convert from one type of configuration
file to another) and tstuu (a test harness for the package).

This is the standard UUCP package of the Free Software Foundation.

The package currently supports the 'f', 'g' (in all window and packet
sizes), 'G', 't' and 'e' protocols, as well a Zmodem protocol and two
new bidirectional protocols. If you have a Berkeley sockets library,
it can make TCP connections. If you have TLI libraries, it can make
TLI connections. It supports a new configuration file mechanism which
I like (but other people dislike).

The package has a few advantages over regular UUCP:

You get the source code.

It uses significantly less CPU time than many UUCP packages.

You can specify a chat script to run when a system calls in,
allowing adjustment of modem parameters on a per system basis.

You can specify failure strings for chat scripts, allowing the
chat script to fail immediately if the modem returns ``BUSY''.

If you are talking to another instance of the package, you can use
the new bidirectional protocol for rapid data transfer in both
directions at once. You can also restrict file transfers by size
based on the time of day and who placed the call.

On the other hand:

It only runs on Unix. The code is carefully divided into system
dependent and system independent portions, so it should be
possible to port it to other systems. It would not be trivial.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Windmill, Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost