[TUHS] [off-topic] Anyone still using USENET?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Arnold,

> I've been using trn for decades

Very fond memories of trn(1).  In comparison, I've never seen a web
interface, e.g. for RSS reading, be so geared towards the user and his
likely actions whilst also allowing for powerful expression.

> to read a very few USENET groups.

Bringing it back to heritage, I was wondering about Usenet the other
day.  Deja News was excellent, Google Groups is pitiful.  A good search
of a comprehensive, historic Usenet archive would be useful from the
TUHS side, but I expect modern analysis means it would also be
interesting to those wanting cultural analysis of a subset of the public
in earlier decades.

Henry Spencer's UTZOO archive is available.  Sites like
https://www.usenetarchives.com have used it in the past, but none I know
of are well maintained.  In part, anything popular would attract legal
requests for posts to be taken down; IIRC that's why archive.org took
down their official copy of UTZOO.

But the data is so small by modern standards, perhaps a self-hosted
searcher is a way forward.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.