Web gateway to this newsgroup

[Skipweasel]

Most ISPs provide a service as part of their offer. Virgin do, for sure

- that's what I'm using now.

[Skipweasel]

Besides which, Google's offering in this field is utterly vile.

[Huge]

Personally, I'd teach your punters how to access Usenet. Teach a man to fish, and all that ...

[Huge]

Kind of. If you ignore their charters you will piss people off and may well have your postings cancelled.

It's breach of copyright, never mind "poor practise".

[Chris Wilson]

Huge wrote in news: [e-mail]:

When you post to Usenet (generally speaking) you lose your rights to copyright on the basis that your posting is inviting comment (reply) and in order that this reply may be forthcoming and on context reproduction of the original comment is required. Feel free to post to uk.legal.moderated for fuller details.

As for idiots sending rogue cancels that's one of the quickest ways or at least always used to be of losing your ISP account. Certainly if not that any 3rd party provider cancels accounts in droves for that kind of behaviour (check *your* terms and conditions - I also have an induvidual.news account - and have for many, many years now since Berlin University first opened up its servers as a free public service.)

Added to which many servers no longer honour cancel requests.

[Huge]

Nonsense.

[Steve Firth]

Yea, and I know I could go ahead and sue your arse into the stone age. No need for the quotation marks BTW.

[Steve Firth]

Umm no, but thanks for playing.

[Skipweasel]

...and he'll bore the pants off you for ever more.

[ARWadsworth]

Nah, he'll just spend all day in a boat drinking beer with his fishing rod.

[Chris Wilson]

[e-mail] (Steve Firth) wrote in news:1jubtac.10e7h1b1ry7l6eN%% [e-mail]:

When you post to UseNet you post everywhere, granted you can use the archive header/tag and granted you can post to a closed server (that is one not connected or with only limited connection) to the wider world but generally speaking you post everywhere ... within seconds this post will be on newservers all over the world, I have no control of this and when you reply your post will likewise be transmitted world wide without any control by your whatsoever.

Any suggestion that copyright law can play any part in this process is laughable.

[dennis]

I think you will find most UK ISPs don't provide a news server. Virgin do because of the number of binary downloaders that would be going off their network if they didn't have one, the text only server was born because the binary one was (still is?) cr@p.

[Steve Firth]

And when you post, you give implicit permission for a narrow range of permitted uses that derive from the common understanding of how Usenet operates.

Any suggestion that it does not play a part is ludicrous and can only be made by someone who is completely ignorant of copyright law.

[Skipweasel]

Oh, /that/ sort of fisherman. I don't mind them - but then I rarely meet them.

[fred]

If I take a photograph, I own the copyright of that image.

If I then choose to post that image to a binary newsgroup for viewers to enjoy that is my business but it does not diminish my ownership rights of the image.

The same applies to the textual content of my posts, they are my creation and I own the copyright.

I will not be giving Gary permission to use my posts on his commercial website.

If you wish to cite legal examples of how making a post on usenet voids the copyright of the poster then feel free.

[John Rumm]

Try our FAQ on this:

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Chris Wilson saying something like:

Bollocks.

[geraldthehamster]

You have to register to use Google groups, but you don't need to pay anybody anything, or muck about with a newsreader. You barely need to be aware of Usenet at all to read this group, or post to it.

Cheers Richard

[John Rumm]

Hi Gary,

Thanks for the very polite and considered approach!

The fact they did not ask was one aspect, and also the fact they in effect use "our" content to sell advertising was I suspect the main argument.

I will chip in a slightly different perspective... as I am the editor of the traditional web based FAQ we run:

also an admin on the more frequently updated wiki:

to say I receive a multitude of emails from site admins looking basically for a link and some free promotion. Not surprisingly 99% of them contain totally unrelated content! However I also get a number of genuine requests for help and information from people who have found stuff on the FAQ via a web search and need to get follow-up questions answered. Working out how to best answer these is not always easy. Sometimes its something I can post a response to myself, other times one really needs them to post to the newsgroup itself.

I would agree with the others, that for participating in a usenet group, web interfaces really are dire, slow, tedious, irritating, and usually a PITA. (do you get the impression I am not a fan?). However for searching existing content in them, they *can* be "ok". Google seems to swing between doing a moderately ok job of it, and making a complete pigs breakfast of it.

Hence my suggestions would be:

1) Make existing search access via google easy to use by your users by wrapping their interface etc. You can restrict and qualify searches of usenet groups to a specific group (although these days they still seem to insist on returning some web based versions of it as well). That should allow them to see the sort of stuff that gets posted here.

2) Encourage users that want to post questions to do so via a news client. We have a fair bit of info to get started here:

I would be happy to work with anyone who wants to make that better, easier to follow, more accessible etc.

Pointing them at Google groups (or for that matter somehow embedding it in your site might seem soft option, but has a number of problems from both the users perspective, and also quite a number of regular users here filter posts from GG anyway)

3) Avoid making yet another duplicate of the content like diybanter since it does not really achieve much, and keep in mind although this group is not as popular as it was at its peak, it still pulls 6000 - 7000 posts a month.

4) Feel free to request a wiki account[1] and use that to either post additional content, or to cross promote relevant articles on your site where they add additional value to stuff we have, or fill in holes etc. We already link to external sites extensively.

[1] See drop me an email.

5) As to moderating content etc... that gets a bit more difficult and I am not sure what to suggest really. You could easily end up putting yourself into the rather thankless position of wading through loads of messages and acting as an intermediary, doing something most of your users could probably do for themselves. You also have to consider if the moderation needs to work both ways... although this is one of the best groups on usenet (IMHO) for good signal to noise, we do get some spam, trolls, flame wars etc here you may want to avoid propagating back to your site. That could be lots of manual effort.

6) Acting as a gateway is a bit of a mixed blessing IME as well. Yes it would get your users questions answered, but if they are only seeing a subset of the discussion threads, then they they are missing out on the vast treasure trove of information that flows through this group on a regular basis. Most of what one learns here is probably accidental - simply from reading enough stuff that is posted in response to questions you never thought to ask! Also I would expect that from most regular posters here, we would much prefer that any dialogue etc is a two way affair that we can also benefit from as well, rather than have follow up conversations appearing on a web forum tucked away behind registration etc (which I guess most would be reluctant to join).

[John Rumm]

and go stand in cold running water, wearing rubber trousers! ;-)