Re: Death of usenet

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 29 September 2008 18:21:57 Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> 
> All of this brings me back to my original question:
> 
> 	Should there be only a single user-discussion
> 	forum (in addition to the devel list), and should
> 	this forum be the sourceforge mailiing list
> 	gnu...@li...? And should
> 	the gnuplot newsgroup be shuttered down?
> 
> It strikes me as a good idea. Having two forums is
> confusing and unnecessary. And a mailing list seems
> to be more accepted these days than usenet.

My observation is that the newsgroup continues to be more active
than all of the mailing lists taken together.



> 
> On Monday 29 September 2008 12:47, you wrote:
> > Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> > > I learned recently that one can subscribe to usenet groups
> > > via Google Groups, so that one gets usenet postings via
> > > email. I have used Google's web interface to post.
> >
> > So have a lot of others.  Which only contributes to Google's "success"
> > as the single biggest source of USENET's problems these days.
> >
> > Google groups sucks badly as a posting interface.  It's the only system
> > that ever managed to create even more broken postings than Outlook.
> >
> > Gmail accounts have become today's source #1 for USENET spam.
> >
> > Reaping Google's adword payouts on Google's own blogspot pages has
> > become a major motive for USENET spam.
> >
> > And last but not least, groups.google.com has so completely clouded the
> > distinction between actual USENET and their own, Google-only discussion
> > groups that many people no longer know the difference.
> >
> > > That being said, I find it confusing to have a gnuplot
> > > users mailing list (gnu...@li...)
> > > AND a users newsgroup (comp.graphics.apps.gnuplot).
> >
> > They used to be bidirectionally gatewayed to each other.  This died
> > years ago, when we lost support by Dartmouth.edu.  Sourceforge.net
> > doesn't offer a USENET gateway.
> 
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-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742