Re: Goodbye with mixed feelings

[Brooklyn1]

>I have just got a new machine that doesn't natively come with a news client >so I am faced with buying and setting one up on it, or not. My decision is >to not. I will probably stop reading here within a month when my old PC >gets retired. > >Most will not care which is fine. To those who have shared their knowledge, >experience and goodwill, thanks and fare thee well. May your seed always >germinate, your tomatoes be tasty and your flowers waft their perfume over >your life.

For someone who claims to be subsribed for as long as you claim you are demonstating an exceptionately shallow intellect... usenet is no different now from how it's always been. All anyone can hope to get from any Newsgroup is as much as they contribute. Perhaps you are simply too full of yourself because over the years you've contributed very little, nothing meaningful other than your self absorbed claptrap. Adios and don't let the door hit your ignorant ass.

[songbird]

David Hare-Scott wrote: ...

most of what you write about seems to apply to other groups as i've not noticed politics, religion or spammers here in the gardening groups.

i'll miss the news from your pastures and gardens and hope eventually you'll figure out how to get a new service (news readers and services can be found still, but you don't sound like you want to even look) and reader set up and return. in the meantime i hope your summer is warm and you get plenty of rain in Aussieland...

for what it's worth i think a lot of the other forums i read (even the web based ones) are fading as more people get ipods and devices which make writing very awkwards. one place recently did an upgrade and the old-timers are mostly gone and haven't returned.

and as this trend continues the actual content becomes what? "likes?" and "r u thr?" ah, well i'll keep on writing what i can when i can and i hope there some sort of audience out there who'll read along.

cheers and all the best,

songbird

[Dan Espen]

As other posters have already mentioned, there are plenty of free Usenet clients. I'm using GNUS, (part of Emacs).

There's even "Google Groups". Not really a Usenet client, but it will get you here.

Anyway, I've always looked forward to your posts and you never disappoint.

If you find something online that you like better, please come back and tell us about it.

Sorry, that kill files are all that we have. I'm sure the guys at Bell Labs that dreamed this up never anticipated the spammers and trolls, or the idiots.

[Gary Woods]

The reports of Usenet's death are greatly exaggerated. (Sorry, Sam!). It's still light years ahead of BBS systems run on a Commodore 64, or Fidonet... it has been diluted by a zillion blogs and other resources, and I can't possibly follow all of them and still have time to garden and send binary data with a hand-activated switch!

Like all families, we have our share of crazies, more easily ignored than the ones we're related too.

So, thank you very much, I'm sticking around.

But that's just my opinion. I may be wrong.

[Nil]

On 13 Nov 2015, "David Hare-Scott" wrote in rec.gardens:

You have to be either foolish or very discriminating to actually pay for a Usenet newsreader. There are many good free ones. The for-pay ones are different but not necessarily better. You have to set them all up, of course.

But if you're looking for an excuse to quit, by all means carry on with your misconception.

[J. Clarke]

Just an aside, but Bell Labs had very little to do with the development of USENET. It was originated at Chapel Hill and Duke and was at one time a competitor to the Internet.

[Dan Espen]

My mistake. The first time I saw Usenet I was working at Bell Labs. All these years I've been making an unwarranted assumption.

Thanks.

Now I'm wondering what command I typed to read news and where it came from. Oh well, some of my memories have been in the compost heap too long.

[Fran Farmer]

Oh yes it is different! But you are still the same old curmudgeon you have always been.

[Drew Lawson]

Usenet has certainly gone through many rounds of transformation. I am a little taken aback to do the math and find that I've been posting to Usenet for 30 years (plus a month or two, I guess). And I don't really think of myself as an old-timer (just an old-fart).

There have been many waves of "personality" (for lack of a perfect term) as to who is coming in and who is leaving.

In retrospect, I guess it was a generatoional thing in ways. It rose with a one group, transformed with another and then got more and more grafitti on the walls.

As for dying, I can't really draw a line. Both it and I will die in this century. I'm just not sure which one of us will go first.

I still think it is a medium superior to web forums, and for exactly the same reasons that Facebook and such don't like it -- no one owns Usenet.

[Fran Farmer]

Agreed. FB is a PITA.

[Brooklyn1]

Is that English... do you mean no kill files 'are' available? Usenet does not supply killfiles, killfiles are available on newsreaders, typically the free news readers do not have killfile ability. However there's really no need to use a killfile at rec.gardens, spam is very rare, and posts are rather sparse, often days pass with no posts... and it's pretty easy to not read posts from those posters you'd rather not read, just delete those posts unread.

[Dan Espen]

The above reads fine to me.

I can think of at least 3 free news readers with kill files. Just so happens to be all 3 I've used.

The signal to noise ratio hasn't been bad lately. But that could be my kill files in action...

[Dan Espen]

Investorvillage offers the equivalent of kill files.

[Brooklyn1]

I already said that newsreaders offer killfiles, the ones you pay for... the freebies generally do not. I read Usenet with Forte Agent:

A one time copy costs $29, then $2.95 a month for support: It's well worth the 10¢ a day for a newreader that's hassle free. It's trouble free and has excellent killfile capability, actually has many features I don't use, there's not enough time in a day to use even half their features... you'd need to pick, choose, and refuse. There are many others if you search :

[~misfit~]

He may well post less than you but quantiity is certainly no substitute for quality. I always read Davids post entirely but with 95% of yours I don't persevere past the first line.

[~misfit~]

I'm with you there. Signed up years ago at the insistance of overseas family who prefer to post there than write emails and now only visit once a month or less for maybe five minutes just to see who's hatched, been matched or dispatched.

[George Shirley]

Yeah, I have kids and grands after me to sign up for Facebook but it isn't going to happen. I ride a gardening group that is mastered out of the U of Kentucky, been on it since around 1990. Otherwise UseNet for me is rec.food.preserving, very low volume nowadays, and rec.gardens.edible, which until lately, has also been low volume.

Used to run a gardening group on Yahoo Groups but people just kept leaving it so I left too. I think a large part of the internet population has no idea what gardening and talking about gardening is all about.

Supposed to be a light freeze tomorrow morning so we picked sweet chiles and eggplant, probably for the last time this winter. Winter garden is coming along nicely, looks like the broccoli is starting make heads and the cabbage is heading. Lots of salad mix and Swiss chard out there, that was our dinner tonight. We're trying to eat better and lighter at dinner time.

[J. Clarke]

IMDB.com has an ignore list, which is pretty much the same except you see a spot in the thread that says "this post ignored" or words to that effect.

[JeÃƒà ¸us]

IMDB is now another site that wants either your credit card or phone details to sign up, as I discovered the other day. No thanks...

[songbird]

unfortunately David seems to not have been around on usenet when it was possible to read the entire newsfeed in a little while. then there came the great renaming and then AOL... (which is close enough to what eternal september was really like). back then there were things called mailing lists which were similar and are still even available.

now i see it gradually declining in some areas but i also see some other groups going strong and doing quite well. for what it is it is excellent and continues on i doubt it will ever be gone entirely, but reduced in scope again and hopefully less attractive to spammers.

ah well, i'll keep on, there's no lack of stuff to talk about and to write about and i doubt i'll be the last person writing to usenet in thirty more years.

songbird