In article <u6nl8m$1nrb0$4@dont-email.me>, mo01@posteo.de says...
>
> Am 17.06.2023 um 19:39:11 Uhr schrieb Rayner Lucas:
>
> > I feel like Usenet needs either another large archive site that can
> > bring new users on board (while somehow making enough money to keep
> > operating), or possibly ways to make it easier to set up and host a
> > news server with a nice easy-to-use front-end so that we end up with
> > a lot of smaller sites participating.
>
> It exists with the rocksolid software.
>
> https://www.novabbs.com/rocksolid/index.php
>
> Sadly, they don't have all active groups, especially not non-English.

Oh cool! Thank you for that. I have not encountered rocksolid before,
but it seems like something I really should find out more about.

It looks like it's all free software, so I guess someone could set it up
with their own news server and have any groups they wanted.

Thanks for the link, very much appreciated!

Rayner

Am 19.06.2023 um 03:25:06 Uhr schrieb Rayner Lucas:

> It looks like it's all free software, so I guess someone could set it
> up with their own news server and have any groups they wanted.
>
> Thanks for the link, very much appreciated!

I don't have experience with it, are you interested in running it on a
public server?

In article <u6pebc$229vc$2@dont-email.me>, mo01@posteo.de says...
>
> Am 19.06.2023 um 03:25:06 Uhr schrieb Rayner Lucas:
>
> > It looks like it's all free software, so I guess someone could set it
> > up with their own news server and have any groups they wanted.
> >
> > Thanks for the link, very much appreciated!
>
> I don't have experience with it, are you interested in running it on a
> public server?

I don't have a lot of free time at the moment, so I wouldn't be able to
promise anything immediate (or that I'd have time to maintain a public
site). But I'm definitely interested in trying it out!

In article <87bkhcfyk4.fsf@osiris>, nospam@nospam.org says...
>
> We need a pre-packaged solution. It could be a docker-compose script
> that spins up an NNTP server along with an API and a web app.
>
> The API would take care of user account management, uploads, and
> the interfacing between the web client and the NNTP server.
>
> The web client would be able to handle images, videos, and external
> links.
>
> Third-party clients could be created and set up to use a specific 'instance'.
>
> Anyway, I'm just tossing ideas around. I'm not even sure if this would
> be feasible :P

Something like that to simplify the setup and administration of an NNTP
server would be great.

Interesting idea to have individual servers hosting images and other
files; I can think of a lot of reasons people might want to attach an
image to their post, but many Usenet sites will reject file attachments
outside of specific "binaries" groups. With this workaround, you could
perhaps have users on the same server seeing images by default, and
users on other servers getting a link to the image instead.

Of course, image hosting has its own problems; social media sites have
people whose entire job is checking for illegal and/or horrifying
content, so there's also a good argument for disallowing file
attachments altogether and offloading the problem to a third-party
image-hosting provider.

People would still need to arrange peering for their server; I'm not
sure if there's a good way to set this up out-of-the-box. Giving people
a pointer to news.admin.peering on Google Groups might work, or maybe
someone could offer some kind of default access to that group for new
server admins.

Regards,
Rayner

In article <86wn00q260.fsf@building-m.net>, john@building-m.simplistic-
anti-spam-measure.net says...

> It's also easier, in my opinion, to configure e.g. Thunderbird with an
> eternal-september account than to set up an IMAP/SMTP email account.
>
> Unfortunately to get people posting, there's this requisite step of
> getting signed up with a server -- even on a no-auth-required server
> (like aioe, which appears to be gone now?) you still have to give the
> server name & your desired identity. Of course, there's always Google
> Groups, but they keep making the interface worse and I think a lot of
> news admins drop Groups postings because of all the spam (I know I'm
> tempted to do so).
>
> In my opinion, Usenet would be at its best if people posted primarily
> from small servers where the admins know every user. I think this would
> help with abuse and spam to some extent, but it means you need lots of
> people running servers, and it means you can only get online if you know
> somebody with a server, which would be fine if The Masses were clamoring
> to post, but they're not.

Yes, it's certainly no harder to set up a Usenet account than an email
account. But unfortunately there's still a lot more friction there than
for other social platforms, so I imagine non-techie users will get
turned off by the process. Google Groups used to be a great introduction
to Usenet, but as you say, it's just got harder and harder to use over
the years.

Agreed, abuse is partly a problem of scale: it's not too hard to deal
with one malicious user but considerably more difficult to play whack-a-
mole with a hundred of them.

I saw a rumour that aioe may have suffered a disk failure, but I don't
know for sure. I hope it comes back, but it's been several months so my
hopes are not high :-(

Regards,
Rayner

Am 19.06.2023 um 17:46:06 Uhr schrieb Rayner Lucas:

> I saw a rumour that aioe may have suffered a disk failure, but I
> don't know for sure. I hope it comes back, but it's been several
> months so my hopes are not high :-(

This is the first rumor. The second one is that the operator is dead.

Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> writes:

> Am 19.06.2023 um 17:46:06 Uhr schrieb Rayner Lucas:
>
>> I saw a rumour that aioe may have suffered a disk failure, but I
>> don't know for sure. I hope it comes back, but it's been several
>> months so my hopes are not high :-(
>
> This is the first rumor. The second one is that the operator is dead.
So, what is this group about exactly? I'm new here and I noticed that
this group is somewhat active.

Thanks

cr0c0d1le <nospam@nospam.org> writes:

> Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> writes:
>
>> Am 19.06.2023 um 17:46:06 Uhr schrieb Rayner Lucas:
>>
>>> I saw a rumour that aioe may have suffered a disk failure, but I
>>> don't know for sure. I hope it comes back, but it's been several
>>> months so my hopes are not high :-(
>>
>> This is the first rumor. The second one is that the operator is dead.
> So, what is this group about exactly? I'm new here and I noticed that
> this group is somewhat active.
>
> Thanks

alt.fan.usenet Support for the last few Usenet fans

The news.* hierarchy is pretty technically-focused and a lot of it is
more for server admins.

This would be a great place to talk about neat newsgroups you've found
that are still active & have high-quality discussions. Or other things
related to Usenet but not falling into the tighter categories of news.*

john

On Sat, 17 Jun 2023 13:06:25 +0200, Marco Moock wrote:

> Am 16.06.2023 um 12:37:51 Uhr schrieb Frank Slootweg:
>
>> Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
>> > Am 13.06.2023 um 12:05:06 Uhr schrieb Frank Slootweg:

>
> Then spread information about Usenet. Without that, nobody will notice
> it.

I been trying to do this myself, I have made mention about usenet a few
times on twitter and talked a bit about it on my personal website. While
I really will not affect anything but if a lot of people do it maybe we
can move the needle.

On Sun, 18 Jun 2023 13:52:11 -0400, cr0c0d1le wrote:

> We need a pre-packaged solution. It could be a docker-compose script
> that spins up an NNTP server along with an API and a web app.
>
> The API would take care of user account management, uploads, and the
> interfacing between the web client and the NNTP server.
>
> The web client would be able to handle images, videos, and external
> links.
>
> Third-party clients could be created and set up to use a specific
> 'instance'.
>
> Anyway, I'm just tossing ideas around. I'm not even sure if this would
> be feasible :P

This sounds like an interesting project. I wonder which would be better
of the 2 week development tool kits I work in, Struts 2 or Angular/Spring
Boot. Or would there be better options. This could be a fun weekend
project.