From Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.gopher

Request for Discussion (RFD)
Full pasted Gopher plain text articles

Dear people of Gopher, Usenet heroes and the rest.

This is a formal Request for Discussion (RFD) for pasting whole Gopher
articles into this gorgeous newsgroup comp.infosystems.gopher

RATIONALE:

On Usenet comp.infosystems.gopher is the practically only place where discussion about Great Gopher is taking place in English language.
It's calm and relativelly quiet place, but nothing last forever.

To bring some new fresh air, new blood into this meditative
environment and make it the source of daily Gopher news I propose,
that we start to paste our whole plain text Gopher articles directly
into this newsgroup.

While several tools for sharing Gopher articles in Gopher space exist,
they are all "proprietary" and one is at mercy of the master of
particular tool. Usenet is free, open, federated, great channel for
this avenue.

CHARTER:

After Gopher legends will write their wisdoms in their Gopher server,
they will simply paste whole article as it is into this newsgroup.
This will also allow practically every brave Gopher giant have
federated discussion, comments for his Gopher article he will write.
No posting older text found somewhere in the garage of grandpa.
Articles should be recent.

Header:
-------
adding Gopher URI for the article into optional header will be
probably just unnecessary complex and not useful.

Subject: (will be defined after discussion and will be fixed).
--------
Article: <title of the article from Gopher>
Every new pasted article will start with subject "Article:" followed
by space and full Gopher title for particular article.

Body:
-----
plain text full article, verbatim copy of the article from the Gopher
server. Both Usenet and Gopher share similar requirements for
the text, like lenght of line, ASCII character encoding and so on.

Body followed by blank line then Gopher URL of the article on its own
line.

Eventual issues:
----------------
More activity with Gopher links included may attract all evil from the
internet and change this temple into free fish market.
Gopher and Usenet in 2024 is quiet like cemetery compared to other
online spaces, so this issue may be irrelevant from "higher
perspective".

Other issue may appear, that some people will post just links instead
the whole article which can be read directly in the newsgroup.

Normally more adequate would be some alt.gopher newsgroup for this
probably, but based on the numbers of already created newsgroups and
amount of people posting articles in Usenet it may be not so good
idea. This would also create issue, that probably not all Usenet News
servers would propagate particular alt.gopher group and people will be
unable to reach it from their favorite Usenet server.

IMPORTANT:

Topic of articles should be related to Gopher and Usenet only if this
will take place in newsgroup comp.infosystems.gopher

In case of some alt.* newsgroup it can be benevolent and practically
used as a Gopher feed over Usenet, so any article in the Gopher can be
shared.

DISTRIBUTION:

This document has been posted to the following newsgroup:

comp.infosystems.gopher

and the following Gopher:

gopher://morena.rip/

PROPONENT:
Name: morena
Email: morena@morena.rip
Gopher: gopher://morena.rip/

CHANGE HISTORY:
2024-10-19 1st RFD.

--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.gopher

morena <morena@morena.rip> wrote:

Normally more adequate would be some alt.gopher newsgroup for this
probably, but based on the numbers of already created newsgroups and
amount of people posting articles in Usenet it may be not so good
idea. This would also create issue, that probably not all Usenet News
servers would propagate particular alt.gopher group and people will be
unable to reach it from their favorite Usenet server.

alt.gopher isn't available on the news server you use? It is on
the one I'm using, with the last thread there being from 2020
titled "Anyone around?", and indicating that other news servers
have it already too (also see https://alt.gopher.narkive.com ).

As for the proposal, I guess it wouldn't hurt for Gopher content
discussing Gopher itself to be reposted to this group. But there
are other newsgroups for discussing Usenet and they can get much
more active than here, so prompting general discussion of Usenet
here might drown out Gopher-related discussion. Since alt.gopher
is completely dead though, it wouldn't really matter what people
started discussing there.
--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.gopher

On 10/19/24 11:05 PM, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

As for the proposal, I guess it wouldn't hurt for Gopher content
discussing Gopher itself to be reposted to this group. But there
are other newsgroups for discussing Usenet and they can get much
more active than here, so prompting general discussion of Usenet
here might drown out Gopher-related discussion. Since alt.gopher
is completely dead though, it wouldn't really matter what people
started discussing there.

I can agree with all your points, I had them all in mind, but did not
want to restrict too much my initial request as some users may be more benevolent.

Also, we have to keep in mind the size of Gopher community and
especially Gopher community using Usenet and this particular newsgroup
which may be really low.

In this time, even relatively active newsgroups are from the perspective
of other channels online, practically dead.

Obviously, pasted random babbling here just because they are also in
some Gopher server would be not adequate and practically spam.


May gods keep our ports 70 and 119 in good shape.
--
morena
gopher://morena.rip/
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.gopher

On 10/19/24 7:57 AM, morena wrote:

Dear people of Gopher, Usenet heroes and the rest.

This is a formal Request for Discussion (RFD) for pasting whole Gopher articles into this gorgeous newsgroup comp.infosystems.gopher

I guess I'd prefer at most for people to simply post a link -- gopher or otherwise -- to whatever Gopher-related content they are wanting to draw attention to and not reproduce Gopher-hosted content. IMHO non-binary
Usenet is a forum for topical discussions and not a digital publishing platform.

Other options:
There is already a Gopher mail list:
https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/

It used to get a bit of traffic but has been quite quite the last few years.

Non-propagated News hosts:
There is a gopher group on Tilde.club:
nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.gopher

I *think* posting requires either an account or some other means of authentication.

Reddit..
There is a little used r/Gopher . Last post was a year ago. I
personally hate all the hoop-jumping required to post on Reddit but a
lot of people seem to be on it.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.gopher

On 21-Oct-24 4:28 PM, Arti F. Idiot wrote:

I guess I'd prefer at most for people to simply post a link -- gopher or otherwise -- to whatever Gopher-related content they are wanting to draw attention to and not reproduce Gopher-hosted content.-a IMHO non-binary Usenet is a forum for topical discussions and not a digital publishing platform.

Yes, Usenet is for sharing articles and discussion, not links directory,
so that's why one should also paste whole article, so one - usenet user
does not need to leave Usenet to get idea what is it about.

Other options:
There is already a Gopher mail list:
https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/

Non-propagated News hosts:
There is a gopher group on Tilde.club:
nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.gopher

Reddit..
There is a little used r/Gopher .-a Last post was a year ago.-a I
personally hate all the hoop-jumping required to post on Reddit but a
lot of people seem to be on it.

Those options are proprietary, not free for users. People there need
some permission from a master.

Cool name Arti F. Idiot ;/
--
morena
gopher://morena.rip/
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.gopher

"Arti F. Idiot" <addr@is.invalid> wrote:

Non-propagated News hosts:
There is a gopher group on Tilde.club:
nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.gopher

It is public readable. The common way to access it with write
permissions is having an account on a member system of the Tildeverse.

<https://tildeverse.org/>

So just do it! Get an account ... ;-)

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BurOF6X4EXc>

Their IRC network has some channels related to Smolnet, Finger, Gemini,
Gopher, Nex, Spartan, ... did I forget some? They are low traffic, so a
bit or even a nibble of patience may be needed, but calling them dead
would be a massive exaggeration.

<ircs://irc.tilde.chat>
--
I do not play Nethack, I do play GNUS! o;-)
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.gopher

I'd prefer not to have full articles posted here, unless their copy here
can be seen as the original.

Literal copies from other sources will stick here for an eternity and
might not get updated when the original changed.

Every Gopher fan has a Gopher browser, so links shouldn't be a problem.
--
4. Hitchhiker 11:
(72) "Watch the road!'' she yelped.
(73) "Shit!"
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.infosystems.gopher

morena <morena@morena.rip> wrote:

To bring some new fresh air, new blood into this meditative
environment and make it the source of daily Gopher news I propose,
that we start to paste our whole plain text Gopher articles directly
into this newsgroup.

While several tools for sharing Gopher articles in Gopher space exist,
they are all "proprietary" and one is at mercy of the master of
particular tool. Usenet is free, open, federated, great channel for
this avenue.

I believe this group was created for discussion of gopher itself, as a protocol, it's usage and projects relating to it.

Personally I think, if the post is relavent to the group then, it would
not hurt to post articles in their entirity.

The reason being, that gopher is a bit of a fad for some. They may
invest quite a bit of time in it initially and write some good articles
about it, but then lose interest and then eventually it might disappear forever. I have seen this happen a lot with forums and all that
collective knowledge has been lost once the site owner lost interest.

The benefit, besides preservation, is that it allows for followup
discussion of the article.

Header:
-------
adding Gopher URI for the article into optional header will be
probably just unnecessary complex and not useful.

Subject: (will be defined after discussion and will be fixed).
--------
Article: <title of the article from Gopher>
Every new pasted article will start with subject "Article:" followed
by space and full Gopher title for particular article.

Body:
-----
plain text full article, verbatim copy of the article from the Gopher
server. Both Usenet and Gopher share similar requirements for
the text, like lenght of line, ASCII character encoding and so on.

Body followed by blank line then Gopher URL of the article on its own
line.

Eventual issues:
----------------
More activity with Gopher links included may attract all evil from the internet and change this temple into free fish market.
Gopher and Usenet in 2024 is quiet like cemetery compared to other
online spaces, so this issue may be irrelevant from "higher
perspective".

A little more activity might be a good thing. I'm sure there are people
writing articles on gopher that are not on the usual aggregators. It
would be nice to know about them.

Kind regards,
--

IanJ

gopher://gopher.icu
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2