If you feel old, I once located some posts of mine from the 80's when names started with net.* and everything was bangpaths like foo!bar!bletch

hmm... here's a taste of it:

https://slashdot.org/story/00/08/27/1439247/usenet-archive-f...

EDIT:

Great Renaming: n.

The flag day in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. “The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources.” There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/Great-Renaming.html

Friend at Yale was a bang-path email relay in 1987. Can't remember the structure, the actual address or how it worked.

hu hum...digs out "Managing UUCP and Usenet" by Tim O'Reilly and Grace Todino, revised 1994.

p293 " ! Should only be used when sending via UUCP. This should be the only special character in the address (called a path). The path indicates each site through which mail will be routed, starting at the left and going towards the right. Mixing ! with @ is not considered good. That is, use:

uunet!ucbvax.berkeley.edu.edu!smith

not:

[email protected]"

In other words because UUCP was dialup and long distance expensive, email was routed through specific known hosts, which is why sometimes people ended up with long bangpathed addresses.

Wow this, is an insane life story:

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/drum-and-drummer-643105...

This guy was apparently a genius drummer as a young man -- jammed with Jaco Pastorius, and a friend of John Medeski.

Then a bodybuilder, steroid user (when it was legal), convicted felon, a sufferer of chronic illness, and epic Usenet flamewar participant.

And deceased since 2012, but people still flame him on Usenet.

https://www.drumforum.org/threads/r-i-p-rob-schuh.73509/

And on top of it he also made drums. I remember that from the newsgroup:

https://rec.music.makers.percussion.narkive.com/RqlLNCp4/pro...

I remember the flames but about drums and steroids, but I had no idea back then ...

The saying is you die twice - once when you stop breathing and again, a bit later on, when people stop flaming you on usenet ;_)

That seems to indicate that usenet can’t die, can it?

> convicted felon

It was drummed-up charges. :)

> jammed with Jaco Pastorius

Another tragic case, sadly.

Anyone else remember alt.sex.cost-benefits-accounting ? I swear it existed (around 1995?) but I've never been able to find any evidence for it.

Newgroup and rmgroup control messages at ftp.isc.org /pub/usenet/control/alt/alt.sex.fetish.cost.benefit.analysis.gz. See also misspelled variants alt.sex.fetish.const.benifit.analysis, alt.sex.fetish.cost.benifit.analysis.

Was it wisely propogated? It may not have been accepted by many peered servers. If I recall not all groups propagated to all other servers (in theory of not in practice?) so if you were not on an isp's nntp server it may have gone nowhere.

Wisely? Seems so. Widely? Probably not (what does on call this kind of typo? Reverse Freudian slip?)

‘alt’ groups typically were filtered heavily.

If I recall correctly it was created at the same time as alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat and alt.sex.tonya.harding.spank.spank.spank, but I'm old and could be misremembering.

maybe someone on alt.sex.wizards would recall

I remember reading about a game developer who was a big time troll/flamer on Usenet for years, and who’s Wikipedia Talk page got so out of hand it had to be courtesy blanked and edit-protected at the highest level.

Does anybody remember who this is? I can’t find him, despite my efforts searching for what I just described.

That would be the notorious Derek Smart.

He's still going at it to this day on Twitter.

He doesn't have a Wikipedia page, but Cleveland Blakemore certainly fits the Usenet gamedev troll profile.

I remember reading his account of the LA riots. Very vivid, some parts that were obviously bullshit, but a few that ring true.

He also got a guest appearance in Jagged Alliance 2. Or at least one of the characters (Calvin Barkmore) looks and sounds a lot like him.

I can't wait for it to eventually get back to the Joe Baptista era and the whole .loon thing. Those were awesome days.

groups.google.com seems to require a Google account for access. Sad.