Hi Martin,

At 2025-10-05T17:50:41+1000, Martin D Kealey wrote:
> If my memory isn't too decrepit yet, USENET got rebranded as *Usenet*
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Renaming> somewhere around 1987,

Ah!  A bit before my time.  I associated the "Great Renaming" only with
the reorganization of the newsgroup name space.

But I see that Gene Spafford was using conventional rather than full
capitalization for "Usenet" even in 1986.[1]

> so I don't think undoing that will stick even now.

I reckon I was wrong.  A better fix is probably to follow Spafford's
orthography.

> That said, does anyone actually *read* bug reports sent to the
> newsgroup?  If so, on which platform?  It seems like the remaining
> “Usenet” sites have become isolated islands, only accepting feeds from
> and sending feeds to paying customers, cut off from other sites. (In
> particular, Google Groups effectively forked from Usenet a few years
> ago, when they stopped importing any feeds, but kept all the
> newsgroups open for intra-site postings.)

That's a good question, but that sort of content-level revision was not
within the scope of my proposed change.

> If nobody is reading and actioning reports on Usenet, should all
> mention of Usenet as a bug reporting channel simply be dropped from
> the FAQ?

Maybe.  Incidentally, the document I was patching was not any sort of
FAQ, but the bash(1) man page.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/net.news.group/c/uWqKiWoiaSA/m/yJZ1uqmCGtIJ

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to