Killfiles didn’t seem to work. Even if you blocked a crackpot, one of the non-crackpots would still stupidly respond to him – a lot of people never understood “Don’t feed the trolls”. So you’d click on a post only to find out the discussion was people pointlessly trying to argue with the crackpot. The crackpot’s own posts might have been hidden, but everyone just quoted his posts in their own replies anyway.
A few years ago, after someone somewhere claimed, like you, that Usenet is still healthy, I had a look back at the group to see what it was like: still dominated by those same crackpots.
> Killfiles didn’t seem to work.
What I used to do was to killfile crossposts to certain groups, the trolls themselves, and subthreads started by the trolls. It worked reasonably well at the time.
Usenet, much like SMTP (but arguably unlike XMPP) built enough momentum before the abuse exploded that there's no reason it can't continue in perpetuity, even if individual groups might come and go. But unlike SMTP it's much more at risk of collapse if good people walk away unnecessarily.
Usenet's not really a single entity. I used it fairly heavily from about 1997-2005; most of the groups I read then are now either tumbleweed or overrun by spam. But a couple of them are still running along happily (if a little smaller than they were). So I think 'still healthy' is pretty contextually dependent.
The most novel thing about usenet is that is effectively an overlay network and completely agnostic to transport. That mattered a lot in the old days, you could run a modem pool at night for instance and download the spools. It need not be a network transport even, you could use bag files and sneaker net.
It would be kind of cool to see a blockchain integration with existing usenet. For instance a header that clients could optionally verify like a Basic Attention Token or other reputation system. That would cut down on spam significantly. Maybe even implement up and down votes and revenue sharing in the fashion of Steemit.
I think this is a big part of the reason why centralization is always censorship and, in turn, why organizations desire that power when setting up yet another discussion site.
Joke aside, in the German parts of the internet there was a widespread culture of using real names, especially on usenet - at least by the late 90s.
Tried to register with [email protected] and got "Too bad, we won't be able to send the password to that address." Am I missing something? Do you first have to register with a valid email and then change it to a .invalid address?
Where/how do I do that now that I've registered? They don't seem to understand that, to me, giving them my real email address just to sign up is the same as "publishing" it.
As for Solani:
> The email from solani reiterates "If you don't want to use your real E-Mail-address, please use an address from the top-level-domain ".invalid""
They mean on posts you make to Usenet. Put that ".invalid" address in the From field on your Newsreader.
You should probably check with Solani if they display your IP address on posts though (NNTP-Posting-Host), because some news servers do.
As that one slowly became luserish, the both hierarchy was created that had a restricted feed http://bofh.taronga.com/bofh.html - that one is harder to find and as I've been out of sysadmin for some time where I could ask the right person for either a feed or access to their server... I can't say anymore.
I recovered many years ago ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/alt.sysadmin.reco... )... crap... thats two decades.
I wonder if I've still got working credentials to The Other Place?