On 2014-07-19, Martin S <shieldf...@gmail.com> wrote: > Is there a point to still use Usenet? Last time I checked noise overwhelm > ed signal by a factor of something close to 542.
Martin, Fair enough question. Seems like a lot of usenet groups have become spam-fests, and using it to d/l various binaries of questionable origin seems to be the major 'driving force' for a lot of people any more - for pure usenet. As others point out, you can filter the spam fairly easily with a good client program. You don't get (as much of) that kind of spam in forums, depending on the authentication process and the vigilance of the forum staff/moderators. I used to subscribe to a bunch of different Linux and programming-related mailing lists... some of which could run to several hundred messages per month *each*. Yeah, decent filters and storage can mute a lot of that, but not as effeciently as reading the groups via news.gmane.org which provides a mail2news gateway for a lot of mailing lists like this one. I don't have to receive or store all those messages anymore (most of which I skim the subject and then mark as read). That said, the irony that there seems to be a distinct *lack* of GUI usenet reader programs for Linux just kills me. Seems like its either Pan, or knode if you're into KDE. Otherwise... you get to go dredge up old CLI programs like this one (slrn). Works pretty well (better than I remember, actually) but still... having to exit the program and restart it to open a different server is *very* old-school :/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list