Usenet and newsgroups

[sundancer 42972xp 1]

Because I’m an old IT fart I remember a time before reddit, forums and the plethora of websites where your main source of news was the usenet. And I wonder have any of you used groups like

rec.games.miniatures.historical

rec.games.miniatures.misc

rec.games.miniatures.warhammer

I still look in these groups but aside from *.warhammer they seem to be dead.

[torros 23816xp 1]

I used to be on gamers group on ICQ

[sundancer 42972xp 0]

ICQ is the young peoples stuff 😉

[jodain 12433xp 1]

@sundancer I remember being involved in some of these newsgroups back in the day, but I think they have been overtaken by online forums.  They do date back to the times when the web wasn’t so graphical and connection speeds were rather slower than they are now.

[sundancer 42972xp 1]

the best part of usenet was: you could block people without them knowing 😉

[limburger 21704xp 0]

Newsgroups as in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die ? 😉

I’m old enough to remember newsgroups. I don’t recall posting in any of them though, but then it’s been ages ago.

I wonder if people even remember BBS’s and FidoNet
It was a bit before I got on-line though.

 

[sundancer 42972xp 0]

Newsgroups as in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die ?

Oh no! We don’t go there… no no no no XD

Oh, BBS, Fido and localy “mausbox”. my telephone bill was…. to behold XD

[enginseer 6977xp 1]

I used to be on a BBS called the “Kobayashi Alternative” way back before it got upgraded to a graphical interface.

Actually, now that I think of it, it was a lot like discord. 🙂 Conversations between a community of friends.  Just all text. No avatars, no pics. No links because there was nowhere to link to.  😀

It was like trash talking with party members in the middle of Zork. 😀 😀 😀

[guillotine 16039xp 1]

I wasn’t very active on Usenet but I remember the warhammer newsgroup. I’m somewhat surprised it’s still going on in some capacity!

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

Newsgroups were great – set your reader to download either just headers or body content (no attachments), dial-up, download, disconnect, read at leisure. Aaaah, those were the days. When “going online” was more about managing your phone bill than just browsing and downloading stuff!

A few years ago I signed up for a year with UseNext – blisteringly fast download speeds but the newsgroups seemed mostly geared towards sharing tv shows and movies (albeit split over multiple zip files). Actually trying to find useful information on newsgroups isn’t like it was in the early ninties any more (I think the last time I used newsgroups for info was looking for a walkthrough for Day Of The Tentacle as there was something about scaring a cat that I just had no idea about).

[timchubbKeymaster 3166xp 0]

last time i checked some of the shadowrun news groups were still activeish, although most of the post were spam or from yahoo groups…

Real shame forte news agent is practically unusable at a resolution greater than 1024×768  was an ace news reader for windows

That said google groups make for a decent web based usenet front end:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.games.miniatures.historical

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.games.miniatures.misc

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.games.miniatures.warhammer

 

[sundancer 42972xp 0]

Thank god thunderbird can use usenet 😉

 

[sundancer 42972xp 0]

@timchubb we have a spammer!

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