Google Groups ending support for Usenet

https://support.google.com/groups/answer/11036538?hl=en

by bilegeek • 3 years ago

286 151 3 years ago

support.google.com

knight17• 3 years ago

This is one of the few times I can tell Google closing down a product / feature is good. Less spam in usenet groups.

kazinator3• 3 years ago

For values of "less spam" approaching "no spam".

rilindo• 3 years ago

Is still worth giving Usenet a try again? Are there any technology Usenet groups that are still active and worth subscribing to?

kazinator3• 3 years ago

Why yes. I follow comp.lang.c, comp.lang.awk, comp.unix.programmer, comp.unix.shell, comp.lang.lisp.

Make an account on Ray Banana's "Eternal September" server (or any one of the others), connect a client and you're good to go.

brightsize2• 3 years ago

comp.lang.python is one of the busier (programming) groups as well.

lproven4• 3 years ago

news:comp.lang.fortran has been helpful to me.

news:alt.folklore.computers is active

I enjoy the news:comp.sys.acorn hierarchy but then I was an Archimedes user.

pklausler• 3 years ago

comp.lang.fortran will be sorely missed; there is no good alternative anywhere else for discussions of the language.

dizzydwarf2• 3 years ago

comp.sys.raspberry-pi is active and well worth subscribing to.

jvolkman• 3 years ago

Most importantly,

You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google Groups.

skyfaller• 3 years ago

But how long until this archive also joins the Google graveyard? If it were another company aside from Google, this might be more encouraging.

beej712• 3 years ago

Seems like this would be a great job for Internet Archive, but a cursory glance doesn't show it there. I get that the *.binaries could be too much and super illegal, but maybe the text ones.

stonogo• 3 years ago

Google has a history of not living up to that particular claim:

https://www.electricmonk.nl/log/2005/12/21/how-google-fucked...

https://thenextweb.com/news/google-groups-stopped-indexing-u...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jp5a77/google-a-search-compa...

https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/3ggogo/google_has_l...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch.embedded/c/zKo883p9AJQ

tap-snap-or-nap• 3 years ago

I doubt that corporations have the right intentions when acquiring public services. In fact, I'm inclined to believe there is a conflict of interest, and their objective may be to prevent these services from flourishing, or to sabotage them in the long term. Immediate sabotage would cause public outrage, so it's likely more subtle. This concern is evident in the recent acquisitions of GitHub and Twitter.

iggldiggl2• 3 years ago

You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google Groups.

What about the newsgroups where access (including the archives!) had been blocked by Google for too much spam (maybe ironically facilitated by Google Groups in the first place)?

njsg• 3 years ago

I guess one must ask El Reg to write about it. I think that might have been how it got solved a couple years ago when comp.lang.c and others were affected by this [1].

Currently, at least mozilla.support.seamonkey (not a USENET group, but from news.mozilla.org - which was shut down, but whose archived content would certainly be useful) is in that state at Google Groups. And yes, IIRC the only SPAM in recent times in that group had been posted via Google Groups...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/01/google_usenet/

kazinator3• 3 years ago

Part of the background for this is that over the past month or more, Usenet has been under an unprecedented spam attack from Google Groups that Google isn't doing anything about. People have resorted to filtering everything coming from Google Groups, with a white list, and there are voices calling for de-peering of Google Groups from the Usenet federation.

jart2• 3 years ago

Sounds like the barbarians are sacking Rome. What happened to mighty Google's thirst for blood and will to dominate the Internet? It feels like they've just started accepting being helpless to stop all this spam.

thfuran2• 3 years ago

How much money is Google making from Usenet support?

rvba• 3 years ago

Google has now an CEO who is outsourcing everything to cut costs.

Google already had a quality problems before due to culture of zero support and dropping projects after their managers' got promoted, but now they have a problem with keeping up to any standards.

That's how it works when you offshore everything - where the main criteria is price and nobody cares about quality at all. They could offshore to mid cost countries, but they offshore to cheapest bidders.

pwg2• 3 years ago

And it is also /interesting/ that the evil one's [1] blog post mentions "and spam" as a reason for this, but fully fails to mention that 99.8% of the "spam" flood is coming from their own system.

[1]google

jacquesm• 3 years ago

We're getting to the point that that footnote is superfluous. Google is a real problem.

troupo• 3 years ago

That's got you play the metrics game.

zafiro17• 3 years ago

The nightmare is over? I've used Usenet for years. Most serious users filter out any post originating from G2 to do away with Google posts. It's been a huge source of spam and annoyance.

Usenet gets better as it gets smaller, honestly. Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active. Several groups in the comp* hierarchy are active. Thunderbird, claws-mail, sylpheed, tin, slrn, alpine, neomutt all handle Usenet just fine. Visit http://newsgroupreviews.com for a list of providers, some free, some paid.

dataangel• 3 years ago

Is there a broader tutorial for this, newsgroups mostly missed me, I don't really grok how they fit into the greater internet or how their hosting works or why you have to pay a separate provider

pwg2• 3 years ago

These two wikipedia articles are a start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nntp

As for "why pay separate provider" -- that would be because circa 2000 most ISP's dropped offering Usenet access for their customers as part of the deal, which created a market for the paid providers.

But, you don't /have/ to pay:

https://greycoder.com/best-free-usenet-servers/

blihp• 3 years ago

In the dark ages when internet access was limited and/or via dialup for most of us, there were several tools and protocols to work with what we had: email, ftp and usenet were some of the main ones. Usenet was basically a primordial set of distributed forums platform (and quasi-social network) where copies of the data were stored locally. It was how a lot of information got disseminated prior to the mid-90's when the web took off and then over.

nvy• 3 years ago

I don't really grok how they fit into the greater internet or how their hosting works or why you have to pay a separate provider

In much the same way that you need a specialized email client to use IMAP/SMTP, you need a specialized client that speaks NNTP to access usenet.

The providers are heterogeneous but usually are basically beefy servers connected to fat pipes to handle the massive volume of traffic, which is why you typically need to pay for access.

ksherlock3• 3 years ago

One way to think usenet/newsgroups is as a set of distributed peer-to-peer mailing lists.

You post a message to your (NNTP) server. Your server connects to other peer NNTP servers to transfer messages back and forth, so eventually your message will propagate throughout the usenet network. (40 years ago peering was through UUCP, etc, and done at night when phone calls were cheaper or only to other local numbers so it might take a week, now it doesn't take that long. See also, bang paths).

Uptrenda• 3 years ago

You think it's worth getting into Usenet for new people?

idiotsecant2• 3 years ago

Its worth it in the same way that HAM radio is / is not worth it. You do it as a sort of lifestyle choice.

Kye• 3 years ago

Gopher is the next big thing.

layer83• 3 years ago

It's worth it in order to experience a more efficient discussion UI. The difficulty is in finding newgroups where actual worthwhile discussion is going on.

lproven4• 3 years ago

Properly threaded, low-bandwidth, decent signal:noise ratio, text-only discussion? Sounds good to me. Far too little of that around.

bsder2• 3 years ago

Is there a reason why you can't run your own Usenet server nowadays?

In the old days, the issues were that bandwidth and disk were expensive. That's no longer true.

Is there a techncial reason we can't have individuals running NNTP nodes?

wolverine876• 3 years ago

If Usenet's requirements haven't increased in a 2-3 decades, and in its moribund state I expect they haven't, then it should be trivial to run Usenet servers on almost any device, at least in terms of resources.

j16sdiz• 3 years ago

Guess it's hard to get others sync with you?

throwawaaarrgh• 3 years ago

no. it's just a tcp client/server model like any other. your isp probably won't let you host services but that's been the case for decades

nijave2• 3 years ago

I think you can run Leafnode if you want to host your own, small groups. Otherwise (my understanding) you need to peer with other providers and be able to consume something like 30-100TB/day if you want all groups on the network (unless you can find providers to peer with that let you limit groups)

Some discussion here https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/ziqdh2/become_my_ow...

skrause• 3 years ago

Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active.

misc.news.internet.discuss and sci.misc are bascially a single person posting links without any discussion.

beej712• 3 years ago

Eternal October...?

aaomidi• 3 years ago

Can Google just fucking kill this?

Literally all my recruiter spam is coming from groups. Even when I worked at Google internally I raised a ticket with full info of what’s going on and they still haven’t fixed it.

(Yes I have the “can’t add me to groups” button on).

hansvm• 3 years ago

Internal Google tickets have <0 priority unless they get raised in a TGIF or All-Hands or equivalent.

If you know anyone still there, just have a peek at all the internally opened tickets about bricked Android phones. Their processes are...messy.

xxs• 3 years ago

following linux process priority schema "negative" would mean elevated.

danpalmer4• 3 years ago

A random ticket thrown into the abyss might not get any traction, but I find a well considered ticket with appropriate instructions typically results in help. Sometimes it takes a quick ping on chat or finding the right person, but people are generally helpful in routing bugs.

I'm regularly pleasantly surprised when I file a bug for something on the other side of the company and get proper engagement on it.

indymike• 3 years ago

Usenet? No. Google Groups, sure.

mock-possum• 3 years ago

Recruiter spam - wait is Usenet an alternate route to finding a new job?

pram• 3 years ago

What’s the state of the art in Usenet clients these days? Last time I had a giganews account I was still using Mozilla lol

brightsize2• 3 years ago

Use it again! Thunderbird has a built-in Usenet client and you can configure it to connect to any number of NNTP servers.

thepostman0• 3 years ago

Depends. I like text only, so slrn

ThinkingGuy• 3 years ago

Pan works well for me when I'm on a desktop with a GUI. Otherwise, I still use tin.

http://pan.rebelbase.com/ http://www.tin.org/

154573452343• 3 years ago

WinVN was always my favourite in terms of UI, but you really needed a local cache server as it had zero offline support.

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

This was discussed in related talk recently when people thought support was going away because DejaNews wasn't working

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38238796

The usenet archive will remain.

standardUser• 3 years ago

This post brought my down a rabbit hole of early internet technologies, leading to a search for the two PC newsmagazines I used to read for free as a teenager in my Bay Area suburb in the late 90's, which ended at this Usenet post hosted by... Google.

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt/c...

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

Wish there was some way to give the data Google obtained in the Deja News acquisition back to the public, i.e., allow free public access to all of it as Deja News was doing at the time.

(After the acqusitition, for a while Javascript was required to access comp.unix.* groups via Google Groups. Eventually, after years went by, this was fixed. But even then some of the data from these groups and other computing related groups is missing. Neither Google Groups, nor any of the well-known spools from individual archivists, contain _all_ of the data from what was available before the Google acquisition.)

LanzVonL2• 3 years ago

Archive.org has it all. It's not in a usable format, it's like tar dumps. But it's on there.

sumtechguy• 3 years ago

This is something archive really should put some resources towards. Its discoverability of items is really poor. Going thru archive to find things is like going to that one consignment shop where the owner bought all of the businesses around him going out of business for the past 30 years and he tossed it all in a warehouse. You know it is in there but finding anything is terrible.

ksherlock3• 3 years ago

The files are compressed mbox format. Anybody who used unix email in the 80s or 90s, before Maildir took over (rightly!) knows what that means, but it's a single text file with all your emails. (or usenet posts in this case).

I've downloaded a few newsgroups that I care about so I can search offline since Google usenet search is not very good.

It is a shame and a huge missed opportunity that archive.org doesn't have a usable usenet browser/searching. I would build it for free. Heck, I would pay them (well, I do donate).

iggldiggl2• 3 years ago

Sort of – for the one newsgroup I'm interested in (uk.railway), the Giganews archive only seems to go back to the early 2000s – whereas I know that Google had posts going back into the 90s, but sadly it's one of the groups where access was blocked on account of "too much spam" (probably facilitated by Google Groups in the first place).

oasisbob• 3 years ago

I remember being excited once upon a time when Google acquired Deja News.

Will be really disappointed if the archive falls into an even worse state of disrepair.

LanzVonL2• 3 years ago

Oh thank God, this is the best news for Usenet in decades. 100% of Usenet spam now comes from Google.

ofrzeta• 3 years ago

Great. Now let's revive Usenet and make it a bit complicated as having to use a specialized reader app like tin and make it a resort for people who are a bit sick of the New Internet.

actaeon1692• 3 years ago

Long live the Scary Devil Monastery.

lproven4• 3 years ago

The Fesse Bouc group is... not dead.

Karellen• 3 years ago

Sounds like a good complement for Project Gemini

https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi

squarefoot• 3 years ago

Text-only Usenet shouldn't cost much to host and operate, and close to nothing if rethought to be distributed serverless p2p style, possibly encrypted. I was used in the past to wait ~3 days for my Fidonet post and their replies round trips, I don't think many people would mind waiting a few minutes for their local msg base to sync with the distributed cloud.

jraph• 3 years ago

Cool, this means it the end of the occasional Google Groups link to Usenet posts.

This also means many broken links, I hope a solution will be found for this.

BixbyUsenet• 3 years ago

I very recently have been accepted as the moderator of an abandoned, moderated group.

As such, I needed to find a Usenet provider who would accept posting into moderated groups, from a moderator.

I originally contacted Eternal September, and Wolfgang informed me my account had been configured to allow such posting, but it does not work ("account not authorized") and now he does not respond to email.

I then contacted four commercial providers, all of whom did not know about moderated groups, and either failed to respond in a timely manner (a week) or failed to grasp the concept of moderated groups;

1. Giganews

2. Tweaknews

3. Eweka

4. Usenetserver

Giganews first line support did not know about moderated news-groups. I explained, and once the support staffer understood, a support ticket was created. Giganews claim a few hours response time. When asked about this, they then say up to three days. After seven days, I cancelled the support ticket.

Tweakness, Eweka and Usenetserver I think are in fact the same company. I could be completely wrong, but they all use the same support software, have the same options in the drop down lists on their sites, and so on.

All did not know about moderated news-groups, and all were unable to grasp the concept, and all then went into that failure mode, where support is giving the wrong answers to questions, not paying attention to what is written, not reading the history of communication, and so finally going into a loop which consisted of them telling me "you need an account to post" (where they meant posting normally - not as a moderator), which they had said before, and which I had replied to before (explaining again about moderated news-groups, to which they explained Usenet is not moderated and anyone can post, etc, etc, etc).

After two weeks, I gave up with them.

sieve• 3 years ago

Contact Greg Lyda at UsenetExpress. You can also reach him on reddit (https://old.reddit.com/user/greglyda).

UsenetExpress is the second-biggest provider of binary news (outside of Omicron, which owns Eweka, Newshosting, UsenetServer & Tweaknews)

kevin_thibedeau2• 3 years ago

You can always use the trick used to post into moderated alt.hackers. You don't need a server to manage approvals of your own postings.

154573452343• 3 years ago

Is that the same trick alt.sysadmin.recovery used to use?

immibis15• 3 years ago

AFAIK all the major usenet providers except for EternalSeptember (which is for discussion) are just download sites for pirated movies. That's why they don't know about moderated groups, and why they have the price structure they do.

immibis15• 3 years ago

I should update this to say it is alive but unwell - text-based Usenet is apparently now mostly relegated to cranks who get banned everywhere else, as well as discussion of the Usenet system itself. However, there are several providers (not just E-S), and it's beginning to enjoy a little resurgence in 2023 due to what's been happening in the social media sphere. I encourage everyone to try it out. I made an account on E-S using my email address, and connected with Thunderbird.

Parker51• 3 years ago

Check out Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC ("Panix"). They run their own news server, know about moderated newsgroups, host several newsgroup moderation teams, and have reasonable rates ($100/year) for NNTP Usenet access and a Unix shell account.

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

For once Google is doing the right thing.

fer• 3 years ago

"You're not leaving me, I'm leaving you!"

https://jfloren.net/b/2023/10/12/0

mnd999• 3 years ago

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

sgammon4• 3 years ago

me: sundar i want firebase to work with bazel

sundar: we are working on an amazing new ai

sundar later:

danpalmer4• 3 years ago

What doesn't work between Firebase and Bazel, out of interest? Bazel seems to be super generic?

sgammon4• 3 years ago

https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk/issues/6115

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

Two examples that come to mind but there are plenty

supermatt2• 3 years ago

Google has seemingly reached the pinnacle of uselessness

To find a client, do a web search for "how do I find a usenet text client"

Result: https://imgur.com/a/8VrfuPu

GTP• 3 years ago

Try removing the quotes from the search query

lannisterstark• 3 years ago

There are plenty of Usenet clients available though. You also have quotes around your query.

preisschild• 3 years ago

Tbf thats how its supposed to work. By quoting it you are explicitly searching for the text "how do I find a usenet text client".

Remove the quotes.

AlienRobot• 3 years ago

That's an awkward PEBCAK error.

Happens to all of us.

Bet whoever wrote that instruction never expected this.

supermatt2• 3 years ago

It was tongue in cheek, as that’s exactly what they said to search for.

To be fair though, even without the quotes the first 4 links are the same! The query itself is also a poor representation of a good search query for Usenet clients.

DonHopkins• 3 years ago

Maybe you don't "understand what's going on in the news".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdkkTV3pIa0

irrational• 3 years ago

And here is DDG

https://imgur.com/gallery/i9OU844

I've had so many people tell me that DDG is inferior to Google Search, but that has not been my experience, at all.

subtra3t• 3 years ago

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not but the other Google search image had the search query in quotes which significantly limits potential search results.

I use DDG for ideological reasons but in my experience Google Search has always been the better engine when searching for specific queries while for general queries most search engines are roughly the same. In terms of overall performance I'd say Google takes the cake, followed by Brave and then DDG/Bing/...

bilekas• 3 years ago

Much of the content being disseminated via Usenet today is binary (non-text) file sharing, which Google Groups does not support, as well as spam

I don't know why but I feel this was written by a young gun who doesn't know how usenet, irc etc works and just wants to push everyone to discord and slack.

nixass• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937637

Just a reminder that there was online Usenet discussion for the fall of Berlin wall, in real time.

Amazing

mkoryak• 3 years ago

Usenet was good for file sharing back when newzbin indexing existed. Is there anything around like that today?

lproven4• 3 years ago

The file sharing is why most providers stopped hosting it and drove it into its niche. I wish it had never happened, and that the blasted fools responsible had been prosecuted. :-(

immibis15• 3 years ago

yes, but more underground. see https://old.reddit.com/r/usenet for recommendations

Google Groups ending support for Usenet

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