Re: Death of usenet

[<gnu...@t4...>]

> I know that the death of usenet has been predicted many times,
> but at least in my corner of the world it seems to be actually
> happening.
> ...
> Any ideas how we might move forward to a new user support mechanism?


All of my usenet feeds have also died within the last year or two, so
I tend to agree. (I also agree all the web usenet interfaces I've seen
are lacking.) Usenet requires large amounts of disk space and bandwidth
(depending on how well-connected one is), and news daemons are terribly
finicky and prone to instability. For the two remaining users (out of
several thousand active) taking advantage of the service, it just wasn't
worth the upkeep.

For asynchronous user support, I like the idea of mailing lists. It is
nice, however, to have a more immediate (synchronous) support mechanism
available, for which I'd recommend IRC. IRC seems to work reasonably
well for a number of other open-source projects. I hung out on #gnuplot
on freenode today, and there are a few people in the channel, but not
so much as a join or part in several hours. To the extent support is
available there, our users apparently don't know it.