[OT] Whatever Happened to:

[Derald]

rec.gardens.organic? Nothing since Sept. 2010.

[songbird]

never seen it on this news server.

songbird

[Derald]

Well, it may be defunct. No new posts since Oct. 2010 and traffic was sparse, then. My test post showed up on the commercial server that I use but I don't think that means anything.

[Farm1]

It's not in the list of the ngs I can read either.

[Snag]

Hmm , it shows up on my list , and there are two recent posts . One by Derald and one response to him . Might be that some servers don't show groups below a certain traffic threshold . -- Snag

[Derald]

Well, it must be extinct, although, it's possible that traffic fell to the point that the free servers dropped it. My test post over there drew one followup. It came from Oz and the most recent post cited is from Sept, 2010, so.... It also is possible that the commercial newsreading service that I use is hanging on to it to help impress the rubes with the bodacious number of NGs it hosts. Is no matter: We have (more than) enough religious warfare here to suit me, LOL!

[songbird]

it depends upon how it was created and propagated by various peers. if it was created on a fairly remote and untrusted peer then many others would not have picked it up for further propagation.

i'm trying to dig into it, but google groups via my connection is horrendous. so far i have not seen any vote for it's creation... *sigh*

if you have the patience for it look at google groups archives and search news.groups for the conversation around rec.gardens.edible creation...

then look into how usenet works, find the place where control messages get sent and search that group to see if it was or not. if there is no archived control message for the creation of the group then it would explain why it isn't propagated and also why it doesn't get much traffic.

the wiki might have better and faster info than trying to dig stuff out of news.groups via google groups.

for extra bonus points go back and read through the great renaming debate and see what happened and then figure out when AOL went online and the effect on usenet and why so much went downhill after that and ... it was quite interesting to be there and now too. especially when you can see the effect of livejournal, facebook, etc on social usenet groups. pretty much killed soc.singles/soc.singles.moderated as communities.

songbird (scratching very anciently used brain-cells because i used to regularly read news.groups and could tell you exactly where to look for the archived control messages, etc.

(back in the day... i could skim the entire usenet news feed and still get my work, homework done and still read other things besides.

[Derald]

Does, "diminishing returns" ring a bell? ;-)

[songbird]

for some people. ;)

for others it means they might finally be getting a hair closer to an actual fact...

songbird

[phorbin]

ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/

[Farm1]

Mine shows ngs that are long dead and which have had zero traffic for years.

[Bloke Down The Pub]

Have to confess that it was me that replied but I did have to subscribe first. Fortunately my ISP has a feed, with no binaries, from giganews and giganews seems to carry many, many newsgroups with little action on them.

Mike

[songbird]

Farm1 wrote: ...

yes, there are very few news servers which honor rmgroup control messages these days. the spam wars really took a lot of the fun out of both usenet and e-mail for being useful mediums of communication.

however, if you think about it in the biological sense, it probably mirrors the development of the immune system.

songbird

[Derald]

That might be because you persist in using that broke-ass OE ;-)

Yep; lets'em advertise that they carry every newsgroup that ever was, regardless of whether it still _is_. Giganews, including binaries, is part of my ISP deal, too. I stick with it because it has been very reliable and I'd still pay the same flat rate, regardless. My newsreading client (a very old "Agent') lists over 111,000 newsgroups and I have it set to filter out "All extinct groups"; ri-i-i-i-ght.... Retention is pretty good; a full header retrieval -- excluding twits, googlegroupies, and most spam -- for r.g.e sucked down 43,776 dating from June, '03.

[Pat Kiewicz]

I don't think it was ever propery proposed for discussion and voted on.

There was a lot of squabbling going on around the time that rec.gardens.edible was proposed/discussed/voted on.

There was a competing proposal for rec.gardens.organic that evolved into a proposal for rec.gardens.ecosystems (which was created but I have no idea if it is active).

(Confession: I was in regular correspondence and colaborated with the fellow who did formal proposal for r.g.e and I was not part of the r.g.o-eventually-ecosystems group.)

[Derald]

It's on the Giganews server but no traffic since June, '09. I was just curious about r.g.o; it's among a host of inactive groups, including the news heirarchy, that show up on my newsreading service. I used to keep up with .news, .groups, and .announce; all just pointless, now.