IMo old usenet has some other (and better) feeling than forums (things go slower and in more depth). But today it seems that most of the usenet is dead but maybe i would like to tray to try it again

1) have you used old usenet ? what was the groups you have used? what memories good or bad?

2) what groups I should have to try today I see some are active yet? what would be most important (where Im interesting in general programming and gamedev?) (both inactive or active)

1) have you used old usenet ? what was the groups you have used? what memories good or bad?

Usenet. Hehe. alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat was a good one, although if I recall there was an exciting one in which messages containing pornographic ASCII art were exchanged (alt.sex.pictures).

Usenet was also useful for getting updates on Archie server listings. Archie was the torrent of its time: you would email an Archie server (eg. umich.edu) asking for a specific file, and you would get a series of uuencoded emails in response you would stitch together and uudecode into a (usually compressed tar) file you could unpack. I remember setting up an entire development system for the Atari ST that way (gcc, emacs with an EDT emulator, TOS/GEM development headers and libraries, everything unpacked fit on one 720k double-sided floppy).

We also used bang addresses back then, strudel-style mail addresses were uncommon and you had to set up nasty sendmail patterns to convert them in your MTA. If I search for my old bang addresses on the Google I can find some of my Usenet messages going back to 1991, still online.

Of course, the advantage of all this was that nobody had an always-on connection, your 300 baud modem would dial out in the wee hours and synch your newsgroups and email, and also up date the maps. Yes, every computer on the internet had a local map of how to route to every other computer, and almost everything seemed to eventually go through a VAX in the basement of the University of Toronto zoology building at the corner of Hoskins and St. George (utzoo).

But really, I see no point in continuing the use of Usenet, it's effectively the same as a mailing list and not as effective as an online forum. It's as useful as a buggy whip.

1) have you used old usenet ? what was the groups you have used? what memories good or bad?

Usenet. Hehe. alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat was a good one, although if I recall there was an exciting one in which messages containing pornographic ASCII art were exchanged (alt.sex.pictures).

Usenet was also useful for getting updates on Archie server listings. Archie was the torrent of its time: you would email an Archie server (eg. umich.edu) asking for a specific file, and you would get a series of uuencoded emails in response you would stitch together and uudecode into a (usually compressed tar) file you could unpack. I remember setting up an entire development system for the Atari ST that way (gcc, emacs with an EDT emulator, TOS/GEM development headers and libraries, everything unpacked fit on one 720k double-sided floppy).

We also used bang addresses back then, strudel-style mail addresses were uncommon and you had to set up nasty sendmail patterns to convert them in your MTA. If I search for my old bang addresses on the Google I can find some of my Usenet messages going back to 1991, still online.

Of course, the advantage of all this was that nobody had an always-on connection, your 300 baud modem would dial out in the wee hours and synch your newsgroups and email, and also up date the maps. Yes, every computer on the internet had a local map of how to route to every other computer, and almost everything seemed to eventually go through a VAX in the basement of the University of Toronto zoology building at the corner of Hoskins and St. George (utzoo).

But really, I see no point in continuing the use of Usenet, it's effectively the same as a mailing list and not as effective as an online forum. It's as useful as a buggy whip.

some groups are still actibve, though i do not exactly know which, becouse there are plennty of them, some are dead

(I mean unused, you can still post there)

usenet has some other feeling than forums, more slow and indepth (sometimes), also some good tradition etc

There are some non-binary newsgroups that are still fairly active. Two that might be of interest on gamedev are comp.lang.c++ and comp.lang.c. Although most ISPs have stopped mirroring usenet, Google and others offer access if you want.

Usenet was a great global discussion forum when the Internet was small. It was mostly active discussion about technical material. It was mostly text. It was mostly useful things that people around the globe took part in. That was the 1970s and early 1980s. Most people didn't know what the Internet was. When usenet exploded out from technical groups in the late 1980s usenet's massive weight cause it to collapse. People were spamming it everywhere, cross-posting everything, and dumping everything binary onto usenet like it was their own personal backup solution. By the time the WWW exploded and became what people considered "the Internet", usenet was rapidly losing relevancy and difficult for any single host to keep mirrored.

Usenet as a whole is dead and irrelevant. There are a few small islands of useful material left, but the global discussion board that existed in the 1970s has been gone for a long time.

It's a shame that the NNTP technology has gone with it. Newsgroups (and also mailing lists to some extent) had advantages over web forums, that there was an open protocol, and lots of different clients that people could use. There was far more opportunity for personal customisations: if you didn't want to follow a thread, you could hide/delete it, if you didn't like a person, you could killfile them. None of this "moderator locks a thread because of something one person said, or he's bored of the discussion" that seems so prevalent on many web forums.

Whilst there are clients for web forums (and blogs, social networks etc), they mostly tend to be basically just web-wrappers, rather than an open protocol being exposed as far as I can tell (and there's no standardisation). Any new features have to be done server side rather than client side, and they tend to be primitive compared to what newsgroups offered. And things seemed to have declined - at least 10-15 years ago, people tried to do things like threading for comments, but now even that seems a rarity.

NNTP isn't dead. Smaller groups like universities still have their own news servers, often requiring credentials. Both my undergrad and grad studies schools have newsgroups for alumni.

Usenet allowed anybody to say anything, even anonymous posters, and there was no accountability. The content needed to be mirrored between servers, and with all the binary spam and garbage ( "Daves_pinup_collection.zip, part 17 of 243" ) the servers couldn't handle it.

In smaller settings like businesses and universities, there are names attached, security is implemented, and those who misuse it face consequences. It is easily searched, allowing access to decades of institutional knowledge. It still works quite well in these environments.

I had not technical qualities on my mind (though I agree this usenet servers were superior over the www forums) but some kind of old spirit open feeling - www forums like this seem to be more temporary, usenet had its weight (or wideness) and freedom, (no moderetors no drivers how it can look like just a place for posting and tematical hierarchy it was/is good, Im sad it lost popularity)

Same seem to be with irc? Is irc in total decline now? Or are there some servers or somethink where I can connest and have 50 - 200 people in one room?

Same seem to be with irc? Is irc in total decline now? Or are there some servers or somethink where I can connest and have 50 - 200 people in one room?

FreeNode has hundreds of channels with 50+ people in them, and quite a few with over 1000.

usenet had its weight (or wideness) and freedom, (no moderetors no drivers how it can look like just a place for posting and tematical hierarchy it was/is good, Im sad it lost popularity)

Usenet had moderated newsgroups, which required approval before posts went active, but don't assume the rest wa an anything-goes madhouse.

The non-moderated newsgroups were semi-moderated with cancel messages. Individual sites and various groups were granted the power to cancel messages, causing them to be obliterated on the server, to stop propagation across the rest of the network, or both. Many location still use automated cancellations, such as when binaries are encoded as text in a non-binary newsgroup. Spam filters are also implemented with cancel message, but usually have a pretty low threshold.

I don't see what you are complaining about; a quick Google search says there are about 20,000 still active non-binary usenet groups out there. And as I mentioned, both comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++ are still active, both listed in Wikipedia's list of most-active usenet newsgroups. You can still get that feeling if you want it, just point your news client at either of those, or whatever else you think you want to view.

Same seem to be with irc? Is irc in total decline now? Or are there some servers or somethink where I can connest and have 50 - 200 people in one room?

Again, there are islands of popularity. Yes, go find some, if that is what you want. Channels like #C are much smaller than they were in the '80s and '90s, shrinking as #C++ and #Java and #C# grew, but you can still find quite active irc channels out there, too.

IMo old usenet has some other (and better) feeling than forums (things go slower and in more depth). But today it seems that most of the usenet is dead but maybe i would like to tray to try it again

1) have you used old usenet ? what was the groups you have used? what memories good or bad?

2) what groups I should have to try today I see some are active yet? what would be most important (where Im interesting in general programming and gamedev?) (both inactive or active)

Well, I actually can't remember using the usenet account .... ohoo my gosh I actually forget almost everything about usenet.