First month of comp.sys.raspberry-pi

There are quite a few of us.

Reading, not posting (yet)

yup, lurking here as well ;-)

-- Cheers,

John.

/=================================================================\ | Internode Ltd -

There is a group actively shutting down newsgroups that they deem to be dead, which led me to believe that Usenet itself is on its final breaths. So it's great to see some new, active newsgroups cropping up (there is also one for Android that was created recently)! :)

- Trevor

On Tue, 07 May 2013 13:03:41 -0600, Trevor declaimed the following in comp.sys.raspberry-pi:

That's rather difficult to do as NNTP is a distributed peering system. Shutting down individual groups would be much harder than persuading an ISP to just shut down their NNTP Servers (one reason I'm still on a flaky Earthlink DSL line -- Earthlink still provides NNTP service [though subcontracted to Giganews ]; whereas Comcast and others have dropped NNTP totally).

To shutdown a newsgroup would require persuading all providers of NNTP servers to drop the group. Granted, they may fracture the group if they persuade a major peering server to drop it (let's imagine some ISP in St. Louis is the common point between all east coast and west coast NNTP servers, and it now drops the group, leaving peered east coast providers, and peered west coast providers -- a schism until some people decide to do a direct peering bypassing St. Louis).

And, actually, I have an example of such a schism. The Critter server is no longer peered, so alt.fan.furry exists in a (little used, as spam drove people away from the main Usenet world) peered world, and in a separate little used (as many users never configured to use the spam-filtered) Critter server)

I have seen discussions on news.groups.proposals for "the great downsizing of..." various hierarchies. It was generally the clearing out of unused groups - some of which should never have been set up in the first place. Perhaps it is more of a right-sizing process.

But, yes, some legitimate groups have seen their traffic fall off over time.

And one for vintage mac kit which was set up after this Raspberry Pi one. It too has plenty of traffic.

James

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iders of

While individual newsserver admins can make their own decisions many respond to the directions of the Big8 board for the eight hierarchies the board has in its remit.

There are other hierarchies - such as alt. - for which control is not as centralised.

James

You may want to read up on "control messages" and "checkgroups" and how they are validated and processed.

er there are many free and/or cheap news servers out there if you have a 'net connection just use one of them. The server doesn't *have* to be run by your ISP. Of course if your ISP blocks port 119 that would be a bit anti-social, some of the free/cheap servers offer other ports though...

I'm in the UK and use a cheap (EUR10/year) news server in Berlin. Excellent and actively run spam filtering as well, I *very* rarely see spam in newsgroups.

Yeah, news.individua provide a pretty good service. Used them myself for a couple of years.

Nice to see the R-Pi group has now been added to sdf's servers after I made that request last month. May it live long and prosper :-)

patric

There are many reasons why a given NNTP server peers with multiple other NNTP servers. That would be one of them, and it provides greater reliability for one's customers.

In theory, it is easy to remove newsgroups. In practice...not so much.

Thanks for the "heads up" as they say. That's my other pet project - rooting a nook (it's not as rude as it sounds!)

Yes, still just reading myself.