From Newsgroup: alt.usenet.offline-reader
On 2014-10-29, Boolworm Cowboy <
bob@nospam.com> wrote:
Don't waste your money going from Agent v7.2 Upgrade to v8.
Does it still allow you to set your line-length at something sane, such
as 72 or 75 characters?
It only
caters to those who still send videos, photos, etc. on USENET. When
its much more practical to post your videos on YouTube, Dailymotion,
Vimeo, USTREAM.TV, etc... I think that's the only thing saving USENET,
is the yo-yos who still send files the old-fashioned way. Yep, a
bunch of perverts who share X-rated videos because they can't get a
live one.
There seems to be quite a lot of activity in the binary groups; enough
to keep the expensive binary news-servers in business. I have no idea
what proportion of that activity is "porn" or "piracy".
What blows my mind, why don't they purge out the dead USENET groups,
and keep the active ones?
Who are "they"? The Big Eight Management have a continuous programme of reviewing activity and removing 'dead' groups from the 'authorised list'
of groups falling within their remit. Whether news-server
administrators bother to take any action is of course up to them;
there's little overhead cost in listing empty groups, after all. Google
Groups of course will not remove their archive of dead groups; they
might (should, sometimes have) made them 'read only' in their interface.
Groups outside the Big Eight hierarchies are even less regulated.
There're groups that have had no activity in
over 5 years, and they're still listed. This gives people a false
impression that USENET is dead, when it's quite active on specific
topics. I've been utilizing Google groups to isolate the active USENET groups, and not waste anymore time with the thousands of dead groups.
Regards,
Bookworm Cowboy Lakeland, Florida
No need to go anywhere near Google; just use your newsreader to look for
groups on a subject of interest available on your news-server, and
consider the number of articles shown as an initial guide to activity,
then go into the likely groups to see if you like what's there. For
example, on my NSP (Individual.net), a search for *cycling* coughs up
U 10 rec.sport.unicycling
U25642 uk.rec.cycling
U 20 bc.cycling
U 5 cn.bbs.sport.cycling
U 8024 uk.rec.cycling.moderated
(as displayed by my newsreader, slrn). Two groups stand out as "busy"
(neither of them 'Big Eight', as it happens).
--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2