On 22/06/2017 00:57, John Rumm wrote:

I think people might be focussing too much on the avoiding the crap
stuff and less on the how to bring new talent into the group aspect.
There is no getting away from the fact that usenet for all its virtues
is less "visible" to later generations of 'net users.

Bullseye.

Some of the web front ends have been slightly less crap than others,
however even there you have a problem that some people like to tar all
users of such system with the same brush and lob insults as a first
response to a genuine questioner just because some other users of the
same portal reply to old posts without understanding what they are doing.

Likewise new readers could equally well be put off before they start
because of the political sniping or the religious loon so courageously
preaching his extremist diatribe from behind anonymous re-mailers.

We have a web based FAQ and wiki, and to be fair articles there do get
100K+ page views, but they rarely then lead onto new participants in the
discussions beyond a few people who email me directly regarding content
there.

Something that could sit alongside the existing web site and enable
discussion there could be good. It could act as a gateway to existing
usenet users, bridging conversation here, while shielding the web
version from the stuff that we are in the habit of kill filing here.


That sounds good - especially if "bridging" means posts to the website
would automatically appear in uk.d-i-y and vice versa replies.


--
Robin
reply-to address is (intended to be) valid