death of newsgroups (Microsoft closing their newsgroups)
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From: Xah Lee on 13 Jul 2010 14:43 ⢠Death of Newsgroups http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/death_of_newsgroups.html plain text version follows. -------------------------------------------------- Death of Newsgroups Xah Lee, 2010-07-13 Microsoft is closing down their newsgroups. See: microsoft.public.windows.powershell. I use comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs since about 1999. Have been using them pretty much on a weekly basis in the past 10 years. Starting about 2007, the traffic has been increasingly filled with spam, and the posters are always just the 20 or 30 known faces. I think perhaps maybe no more than 100 different posters a year. Since this year or last year, they are some 95% spam. comp.emacs is pretty much just me. gnu.emacs.help is not much better. It's pretty much the same developers and the same few elisp coders, with perhaps 1 new face with once-per-lifetime post every few days. gnu.emacs.help is doing a bit better because it is connected to fsf's mailing list. comp.lang.perl.misc is dead few years ago. It's filled with just snippet of FAQs that's posted by machine. There's perl.beginners since 2002, and it's a moderated group. The one newsgroup that i use that's still healthy is comp.lang.python. Part of the reason it's healthy because it's connected to a mailing list, and python has become a mainstream lang. Though, it is also infected by a lot spam in late years. I did a study of language popularity by graphing newsgroup traffic thru the years. See: Computer Language Popularity Trend. I thought about updating it now and then, but it's useless if the majority of posts are machine generated spam. For vast majority of people who is not a regular user of newsgroups in the 1990s or earlier, i suppose newsgroup has been dead since perhaps 2002. It's somewhat sad. Because newsgroup once was the vibrant hotbed for uncensored information and freespeech, with incidences that spawned main stream public debate on policies, or change of nations. (scientology being one famous example, then there's Cindy's Torment censorship, then i remember also several cases of political dirty secrets being released in newsgroups ) These days, much of this happens in the blogs and there's Wikileaks. Xah â http://xahlee.org/ â
From: Kenneth Tilton on 13 Jul 2010 23:24 Xah Lee wrote: > • Death of Newsgroups > http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ2/death_of_newsgroups.html > > plain text version follows. > > -------------------------------------------------- > Death of Newsgroups > > Xah Lee, 2010-07-13 > > Microsoft is closing down their newsgroups. See: > microsoft.public.windows.powershell. > > I use comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs since about 1999. Have been using > them pretty much on a weekly basis in the past 10 years. Starting > about 2007, the traffic has been increasingly filled with spam, and > the posters are always just the 20 or 30 known faces. I think perhaps > maybe no more than 100 different posters a year. Since this year or > last year, they are some 95% spam. Forest. Trees. Please note order. Case in point: twelve weeks ago His Timness mentioned this on comp.lang.lisp; http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/ Now we have this, a port of a desktop app to the web: http://teamalgebra.com/ It happened fast because http://qooxdoo.org/lets me program the Web without bothering with HTML and CSS and browser variation as if I were using a framework like GTk. I learned about qooxdoo... on comp.lang.lisp. The moral? If you look for the spam, you'll find it. kt -- http://www.teamalgebra.com "The best Algebra tutorial program I have seen... in a class by itself." Macworld
From: Steven D'Aprano on 13 Jul 2010 23:40 On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:24:12 -0400, Kenneth Tilton wrote: > The moral? If you look for the spam, you'll find it. And if you *don't* look for spam, you can be sure that some goose will reply to it and get it past your filters. Thanks for that Kenneth, if that is your name and you're not a Xah Lee sock-puppet. Followups set to a black hole. -- Steven
From: Kenneth Tilton on 14 Jul 2010 11:19 Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:24:12 -0400, Kenneth Tilton wrote: > >> The moral? If you look for the spam, you'll find it. > > And if you *don't* look for spam, you can be sure that some goose will > reply to it and get it past your filters. Thanks for that Kenneth, if > that is your name and you're not a Xah Lee sock-puppet. Let me see if I have this right. Your technique for reducing unwanted traffic is to openly insult one of the participants? That is how you clean things up? Because most people on Usenet respond well to personal insults and hush up? I have so much to learn! Or was it this? > > Followups set to a black hole. > > That works? Amazing. Here, I'll show you what spam looks like: my steadily-improving revolution in learning Algebra: http://teamalgebra.com/ kt -- http://www.stuckonalgebra.com "The best Algebra tutorial program I have seen... in a class by itself." Macworld
From: John Bokma on 14 Jul 2010 12:20
Kenneth Tilton <kentilton(a)gmail.com> writes: fup2 poster > Let me see if I have this right. Your technique for reducing unwanted > traffic is to openly insult one of the participants? Heh, or just ploinking them (done). Or making them cry like a little baby: http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/t2/harassment.html (it had an effect for a while :-D ) -- The John Bokma guy j3b Hacking & Hiking in Mexico - http://johnbokma.com/ http://castleamber.com/ - Perl & Python Development |