alt.usenet was the freakin roman empire. free, worldwide, global communication,
freedom. What’s more it was an INFRASTRUCTURE, so that if for instance a certain newsgroup LOSES all of its posts, it can be recreated from a backup somewhere.
Then, you BARBARIANS came along and destroyed the usenet with spam. felching you with an electric air pump would be too kind. I especially like the ads for kiddie porn. It really elevates the whole concept of love. Hell, porn itself is so uplifting, nothing brings a tear of nostalgic joy to my eye than the thought that all women WANT TO HAVE HOT RAUNCHY STICKY SEX AND HAVE ME PENETRATE THEM UP AND DOWN TILL IT HURTS. touching. really.
So what happened after the Visigoths came through and dragged off the last of the roman patricians to be their catchers? everyone retrenched.
We are living in a feudalistic society. Message boards are feudalism. Granted, most of the time there is more control. Thats about all i’ve give em. but this is one of the few times where we take a step backward, do you realize what we could have had? We could have had ALL messages written by EVERYONE cached for eternity! And now we get “oops, sorry, we took the server that was storing your messages and ritually burnt it in an offering to Bill Gates.” isnt this supposed to be a progressive society?
thank you spammers. i think i’ll visit your sites, but wait, my cash cow, er, washing machine just stopped.
A thousand years from now historians will be trying to piece together message board traffic to get a picture of life from 1995-present. but it’s gone, thrown in the bit bucket or spread out into the universe like the radioactive entropic background noise. Pat yourself on the fucking back. History will not think so kindly of you.
In this case, the easiest and most efficient way to adapt is to grab a good-quality newsreader, such as the freeware XNews, which allows you to build scoring filters based on regular expressions.
Spambots are automated. Automated processes tend towards patterns. Once you find the pattern, you can kill the spammer.
Just a suggestion from an alt.* vet.
Note: the author is in no way affiliated with the maker of XNews…he just thinks it’s a really nifty product.
Far be it from me to use the glowing embers of the BBQ Pit and suggest that SDMB is the uber-board of the net. Or that The Chicago Reader, (Hail!) Cecil Adams or the Moderators have anything to do with it. Them in their Comfy chairs and all!
The SDMB is a European sports car. Very clean and shiny, lots of leather and carbon-fiber trim, even a nice billet shift knob. It’s predictably professional and lets you do just enough to be fun, while restricting the chances of you doing yourself some serious damage.
Usenet, OTOH, is a Hemi 'Cuda with a JATO bottle strapped to its ass. Spartan, lots of goodies under the hood to tinker with, fast as a scalded cheetah from point A to point B…but beware of those curves.
And that’s the last time I do a metaphor before coffee.
And don’t forget, SD posts are not permanent, as those who lived through the Great Unintentional Purge will tell you.
As for Usenet, I won’t shed any tears over its loss to history. There seems to be millions of messages, and considering the vast amounts of information transmitted through the net (such as Weblogs, diaries, personal sites, news sites, etc), there’s still plenty to trudge through.
