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Gmane is in danger of disappearing. It's an important gateway between mailing lists and usenet. The Gmane sysadmin is apparently getting too many threats, and it has made him ill. Here's his announcement and ensuing discussion.
Is there anyone that could help gmane stay alive?
-- hendrik
Wikipedia summarizes Gmane as follows:
Gmane (pronounced "mane") is an e-mail to news gateway. It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Gmane is an archive; it never expires messages (unless explicitly requested by users). Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service.
Alexa reports Gmane has a global rank of 12,037 (up 280).
[At the time of accepting this story, I am getting a 523 error when attempting to reach http://gmane.org/ --Ed.]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hyperturtle on Friday July 29 2016, @07:22PM
If it means that such data is kept in a format that works on my old devices, and is in text format, and has figures or pictures that don't take up 80% of the page, and has no native advertising -- or "mobile first" nonsense -- then I'd donate money to keep it.
Have you tried visiting any tech vendor's help section lately? The ones that have 'modernized' have become challenging to use -- instead of a high page density of information, it's all airy and light with over sized icons instead of actual details. With an integrated search feature that suggests "did you mean -- run the initial setup wizard?" Or ones that show "HOT! Trending topics" for... a KB support library? What? Just give me a searchable index. I dont want the tags or the social integration, I just want to access the fricking manual that wasnt included in the box.
It may be that gmane dies not because people do not recognize the value as you stated and see no reason for it to continue its existence, but that because the value it has is recognized by those that wish it to be gone for a variety of reasons. DDOS anything enough and it takes someone with good funding to keep it online. People that use it clearly are not complying to the narrative. Knowing how stuff works... that's hacker stuff!
I am the type that still has Cisco UniverCDs copied onto a file share because it is faster to look through those sometimes... and that Cisco's site is not immune to having links to their own documentation that have since been removed.
To that extent, I imagine there is real value in a resource like gmane probably could help fund itself if they provided a searchable database of archived threads. It is always valuable for a network engineer like myself to have off-line material, because when you are in a metal vault underground, you might not be able to just 'go online'. Then anyone wanting to help support a client with some far out elderly stuff may have another avenue to pursue to helping fix the problem... or just because it can be cool to read through and see how far we've come.