As i've started participating in online bulliten boards more and more, I start to lament the passing of the usenet. Besides the fact that the display (newsreader) and the information (NNTP posts) were complete seperable, it also offered a simple way to search(via deja news at the time). I still rely on groups.google.com for many information quests, but it's slowly growing out of date as everyone switches to these web bulletin boards.

This is more of a rant/discussion topic than a question, but has anyone found a good solution? Just hope google found the BBS that has what you need?

Matthew

Every BBS I've ever used had a built in search feature. Some are better than others though.

An interesting idea would be a BBS metasearch....

The problems with Usenet have become a nightmare AFAIC. Too much spam, too many ISPs blocking access, too little centralised control, to name just 3.

Web forums don't suffer as much from these problems. ISPs aren't going to block port 80, since as far as they are concerned the 'Internet' means 'web and email'. The fact that forum boards are privately owned allows the owner to maintain better controls against spamming, and also allows for better identity validation than Usenet. Other benefits include better linking to other hypermedia.

A nostalgic part of me laments the decline of Usenet's importance. But the reality is that web forums can be better.

I still post & d/l a good deal of mp3 from Usenet. Quality's generally better than peer^2 and the variety's greater. It does take time sifting through 10,000 posts though.

-Zeke

Other than one massive troll and a few baiters, the Solaris admin related groups I read are pretty clean and useful.

Gotta try easynews.com then. Has a great search function, lightning fast d/l, $10 / month for 6 gigs. Plus 50 day retention.

Oh, and it can zip up to 1 Gig for massive downloads.

doing a free trial now. how do you do the zipped files?

Edit: Never mind. I got it.

Edit 2: Sweet.

It is really nice. I do the United Devices cancer research distributed program too, so for every 15 days of cpu time, U get a free gig. Since I have 10 or so machines running UD all the time, I usuallt get 10-11 Gigs a month total downloads.

If you're on the Easynews trial you must try the new global search - very handy feature.

Gareth

Usenet was good for files with this one reader that I had for like a week once and could never ever ever find again ever. Since that news reader is in bit heaven, Google Groups is my first and last stop for all technical questions I have on any and all subjects. And yeah, I hop on there with Netscape News thingey and answer questions when I can.

The centralization that Google Groups and Deja provided really made Usenet a great resource. Too bad it's not easy to use, better administered, and more free of spam. Alas, spam kills all.

And what IS the deal with spam anyway? Nobody can possibly imagine to make any money by creating spam. Spammers must simply be out to ruin the internet. But, so I'm told, there ARE users out there who are dumb enough to try and punch the monkey or buy Viagra from xxx90viagra4free@hotmail.com.

What do you mean death of usenet? It's still the best delivery system for its primary purpose: Porn attachments.

-Zeke

Dude... that global search rocks! I've been a member for a year or so, and never saw that. Ooooh, even better now.

Ahh, I crossed a milestone. Wheee.

What do you mean death of usenet? It's still the best delivery system for its primary purpose: Porn attachments.

Despite the porn, the MP3 feature is really nice. Instead of an active search (as in p2p), you can browse by genre. Might find something to "tickle your fancy".

I've been using Newsrover and it has a handy search feature built in - it allows you to choose where to search and I usually find what I need. Granted - I'm using news mainly for binairies and not searching for messages and stuff, but the search tool is very handy. It also has a separate mp3 search tool.

There are tons of features geared to searching non-binary related message forums too, and the autoscanning feature has tons of settings to tailor to exactly what you need. The demo allows you to do pretty much anything, but limits you to a download queue of no more than 50 items, so I just went ahead and spent the $29 for it.

I'm using Newsfeeds, and they have tons of servers. They have a server called "spamkiller" that pretty much does what it says. They have pretty much any server to fit whatever your need is.

Dang, that one program I had was great for binaries. All you had to do was click a single segment of a single rar (or zip, arj, arc, lha, tgz, or whatever) within a set of rars and it would not only check to make sure that all the segments of that rar were there, it would make sure ALL the segments of ALL the rars were there. Because heck, what good is a rared file if you're missing one segment of one rar?

But, alas, the program is long gone from my computer and I can't help anyone find it. I just thought I'd share the memory of how cool it was. haha, but no more cool newsreader has led to me doing more productive things with my time than searching newsgroups.

Because heck, what good is a rared file if you're missing one segment of one rar?

But...that's what PARity archives are for

Newsrover will do that for you. All you do is right click on any single rar, and choose "Download and decompress RAR archive". If PAR files are present and some RARs are missing, Newsrover will automatically recreate the missing RARs, then unrar them to your download directory automatically.

Plus, if you subscribe to a news provider that has multiple servers, or if you have access to multiple servers, you can set their priorities. So, lets say a few articles are missing from a multi-part binary post on your primary server, Newsrover will search each server until it can find those matching articles on another server. Its pretty cool.

PAR files kick ass, I was so happy to see those pop up.