Re: Google Groups Soon To Be No More

I am unclear: they don't say GG is ending, just that the link to usenet is severed. Does that mean there will be a fork into two SEDs - one on usenet and the other a GG?

piglet

If you want an idea about what effect Google Groups exit will have, check out

How much of that is spam?

All they are saying is that they used to pick up posts from usenet, and that they are going to stop doing that from the 15th February 2024.

The archive will still be there, but it isn't going to be kept up to date any more.

Sci.electronics.design existed before google groups, and it will probably survive without them. Some regular posters despised people who took advantage of google groups and will probably be happy that posts will again be restricted to the glass teletype format and go away after a couple of days.

I recently became thoroughly fed up, and started filtering all messages originating from googlegroups out of my small leafnode- type feed.

The total traffic in most newgroups which still had any, dropped by about 90%.

I don't doubt I'm missing a few interesting messages posted by a few interesting humans... but the massive reduction in spam seems a worthwhile price to pay.

It will be interesting to see if the volume and quality of USENET traffic ever starts to recover from the damage done by Google's largely-unmanaged flooding from googlegroups.

There are other forums available.

For example.

Interesting to see that Google usenet servers weren't even in the top30 in the previous few years and are heavily influenced by northern hemisphere school attendance, by month.

RL

Probably -- I've been trying to dig up schematics / guides for making little altoid-tin CW tranceivers (kinda fell into ham raido thanks to covid). I'd hazard 90% of the "resources" I find nowadays are to the effect of "Buy my premade module!", with maybe a VERY small handful of old-timers who still have schematics...

Hoovering up all the personal sites I can, before they fall offline ...

I just looked at google groups SED page for the first time in some years.

It appears to me that IF usenet posts were no longer present, then the google groups postings would be entirely composed of spam and other crap.

(In Tagalog?).

RL

I wonder if this means that school system PCs are being inadvertenly used as spam generators/amplifiers?

I expect there's little money or expertise to police that sort of thing and plenty of machines to play with.

RL

I don't see any of the tagalog posts on usenet and my plonk file would bust if it had to deal with all those showing on google groups.

Using Eternal-September.

RL

For spam, a time-limited block usually suffices. There have been times when a new kill filter wouldn't stick. I weeded out old entries and it seemed to do the trick, hence my guess at size limitations.

None of the google groups spam authors or subjects are identified in the current list, but I don't see them posting on usenet, either.

I'm using agent V4.2. Maybe it's broken here, but in a good way.

RL

Google is doing fine. Usenet is struggling. Google did offer google-groups users the opportunity to report spam. and in times past the limited amount of spam that showed up got deleted after it was reported. Google doesn't seem to have bothered to automate the process, and the south-east-asian online gambling industry flooded a previously adequate system.

A possible replacement to a usenet group would be a mailing list. Most of us do have a domain and could host it. It won't be as free as usenet as the hosting person(s) will have control - and also plenty of work on their hands to fend off the spammers who are trying to kill this group (they tried CAE, too, saw no traffic there and let it go).

====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI

I mean, I'd be happy to show you lot my ham-fisted attempts at circuitry (just gotta figure out how to do that, I guess)

I can definitely host stuff myself -- more thinking out loud of "hm, how to do it" ;)

There may be genius hidden inside those schematics. Who can tell? Someone with better eyesight than me. :-(

Ed

Viewable! (As always.) Jan - please take note.

Nice.

Ed