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I'm a member of the ISCA BBS; in days of yore, this stood for the [University of] Iowa Student Computer Association, though ties with its namesake were broken about a decade ago. In its heyday in the early 90's, the ISCA often had 1300+ simultaneous users online, and hundreds more queued to get on, only limited by the lowly T1 and the HP DOMAIN Unix system on which it ran.
In the years since, usage has dropped and at any given moment, there may be 10 or 20 concurrent users. As one might guess, the appeal of a text-based Citadel BBS doesn't have the same draw that it did 20+ years ago. Despite this, it's still very much a live (though dramatically diminished) system. I am sure that there are still those "out there" who no doubt would enjoy a trip to retroville, and an infusion of fresh blood would be fun for all.
So, I'm looking for suggestions on how to go out and get them? I'd be willing to throw some money at it if I thought the odds of success were reasonable.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:04AM
Usenetbwith uucp and a 9600 baud modemt was a lot more useful and fun for me than waiting for yet another copy of jQuery to download over a cable modem.
There are lots of newsservers one may pay ten bucks a month for high speed encrypted feeds but their terms of service always forbid passing your feed onto others. Thats not what usenet is for.
However there are still a very few nntp servers that are free if charge and that do not serve binaries. You dont need all the newsgroups, only those you and your friends, family, schoolmates or colleagues want to read or post to.
Look at it this way: tracking pixels dont work in plain text messages.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:52AM
www.eternal-september.org -- Non-binary text-only nntp feeds.
And I2P has a seperate private nntp feed. Possibly a few.
Povray.org also has a private nntp feed (non-redistributable) for all aspects of povray use and development.
(Score: 1) by gozar on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:25AM
I've looked at this a lot over the years. What is needed is a good USENET web app. There have been a couple of projects, but nothing that really succeeded into bring USENET into the web era. I'm shocked how many people use forums, which are just terrible to read/follow compared to a good USENET reader. Look at Reddit, just terrible.
Discourse [discourse.org] is a pretty decent attempt at fixing the forum issue but it's still not ideal.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday July 22 2015, @07:09AM
It would be possible to attach rehash as a frontend to USENET, given the underlying work we've done for nexuses and such. If I ever get the bidirectional gateway coded, it would be interesting to take say comp.misc and feed it into the database.
Still always moving