I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.
Usenet was great in the late 90s and early 2000s. I posted a lot, and met some great people. I got a job doing tech review of books about WAP and WML from my posts in a group about the forerunner to mobile internet, and another job with a company making intranet software from some posts about ASP and vbscript. I've no idea where I'd go for that sort of forum today.
Me too, but not for usenet. The server-to-server protocol is a low ceremony, high observability, standardised and battle-proven gossip-flood protocol with hierarchical channelisation and robust mature tooling, ideal for eventually-consistent distribution of telemetry and control messages over a node mesh of uncertain reliability up to global scale. What's not to like?
I'm sorry, it's only for people I know personally. Also, it only holds minor Usenet hierarchies like the vestigial dk.*.
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
https://eternal-september.org/ last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
Seems to have patchy coverage in the places I was looking, and date range search wasn't working for me. OTOH, I think I found some posts not archived by Google...
Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.