Web gateway to this newsgroup

[Owain]

Or get your account terminated by your ISP

Owain

[John Rumm]

Except we have not actually got a charter for this group... ;-)

[Skipweasel]

I wish. If only getting rid of objectionable usenet users was that simple.

[Skipweasel]

No, that's cabinet ministers.

[Skipweasel]

We could make one. It's (allegedly) what we're all supposed to be, if not good at, at least interested in. Or would that be more of a craft thing?

[John Rumm]

In which country? What about in those without such laws?

I understand the theoretical concept, but in practice I would be greatly surprised if anyone ever manages to make a copyright infringement case stick, should their advice on defrosting a condensate pipe were misappropriated. As to globally enforcing remedy, forget it.

[Tim Watts]

Though a fair few potentially helpful people will ignore you through no direct fault of your own, due to perceived badness of USENET postings eminating from GoogleGroups...

Cheers, Tim

-- Tim Watts

[Owain]

It doesn't happen often, and it's not a permanent solution, but eventually they get tired of it and go away.

Owain

[DIY]

Hi John,

Thank you!

I agree. Their entire site is based on Usenet groups. I can see how it upsets people. Our view is, we have DIYers who need advice, they are at our site because they are stuck and do not know Usenet. We want to get them connected to you people.

This could work and we have not ruled it out, but we wanted to avoid promoting Google groups.

We are happy to show users how to use a newsgroup, and I think many users will convert from our site to the newsgroup directly, but these will be the long term users who return to the site. We could possibly set up a auto email to them after 10 posts, showing them that URL you gave me and recommending they join directly.

I think there is a group of users who want to make 1 post or 5 posts about a topic, and then go on their way. They don't want to download a newsgroup client, or pay =A310 for a server. They would be happy to use Google Groups, but I don't want to promote Google.

Yes! If we are getting advice from this group, then we would be more than happy to contribute to the Wiki.

We were going to moderate just posts to the newsgroup from our site. We did not want to create more spam.

I agree, It is unrealistic to monitor incoming posts from the group.

Sorry if this is a stupid question. If I was new to the group (which I am) and I wanted to search past posts but did not use Google groups, how would I do this?

[Steve Firth]

Believe what you like. I know at least one person who won a copyright case over material published on Usenet. Paola Kathuria who published a guide to the WWW back in the days when the WWW was new had her material ripped off by a publisher. She won.

[gary white]

Hi Steve,

I am not quite sure how it all works legally. I agree that your posts are 100% your property and copyright. However, does displaying your content infringe copyright when you post it to a server and do not request it to be removed later (X-No-Archive)? Why has Google published entire Usenet groups if it is illegal? Maybe by not asking them to remove your post you are giving them permission to archive it? I dunno, I am not a lawyer.

It is not just Google or DIYbanter that holds your posts, it is hundreds of newsreaders and servers across the world. DIYbanter is just another server, except they allow their users to download the content via a forum instead of a newsreader.

I think John is right, it would be difficult to stop someone like DIYbanter or Google publishing the content because they do not claim it as their own and they are not charging for the content. However, in my opinion it is unethical to do so to make a profit.

In the case of Paola Kathuria, maybe the publisher was claiming it as their own and selling it to make profit?

[John Rumm]

You may be able to get google to do some of the work for you without actually promoting their groups interface...

There are a few other web based alternatives to google out there that give rudimentary usenet posting capabilities. There are a few email to usenet gateways as well. Can't say I have look in detail at any of them recently though.

There is no straightforward answer to that... there are some other sites including diybanter that *may* have a copy of the groups content and a search capability.

Historically the first site to archive usenet as a whole was DejaNews. They eventually folded, and google took their place. Eventually they also acquired much of Deja's original historic archive of old posts. To an extent google is the main game in town now since they not only have the search capability, but also the archive. Needless to say one is not much use without the other. You may find that because some of the usenet scraping web sites like diybanter, that the internet wayback machine also has a proportion of usenet archived.

I you are starting from scratch without an archive of postings to search, then all you can do is download as many are as available on your news server and then search your local copy. (news readers have all this sort of thing built in of course). Now if you read a group for a while you can configure your software to set how long it hangs onto posts. So you can keep more history than your news server if you want. Some smaller ISP servers may only hold a few days worth of postings before expiring older ones. Some of the larger commercial ones like giganews (when many ISPs now sub contract their usenet provision to), may key many months or even years of posts.

[John Rumm]

A somewhat different case however. One paper based book publisher ripping off content and publishing it as their own, is a relatively easy target.

However stopping multiple additional web based copies being made by aggregation sites from one of the multiple copies sat on a multitude of freely available NNTP servers is a rather more ambitious task. Especially if what they are doing is perfectly legal in their own jurisdiction.

You may notice that difficulties the entertainment industry and all its high profile legal teams have in this respect.

[Bob Minchin]

Your readers would be best served by an accurate and concise tutorial written by you and published on your site so they can use usenet properly. If they object to this then they are not D-I-Y ers

Bob

[Owain]

Google is fairly clear that it is providing web access to an archive of a Usenet group. On the front page of Google's uk.d-i-y it says "This is a Usenet group ... learn more" and links to

is rather more reticent (especially if you have images off and see the ALT text "A DIY & home improvement forum. DIYbanter") about the fact that it is reusing Usenet content under the DIYbanter brand - if it wasn't for uk.diy then DIYbanter wouldn't have anything.

And some of the inhabitants of other web fora might be rather disappointed at the rigorous peer review that happens in Usenet. We also tend to deal robustly with any Americans that wander in :-)

Owain

[geraldthehamster]

I have to say that I'm seeing a lot of off-topic juvenile, racist and homophobic postings in uk.diy of late, apparently from one source. You certainly don't see that in web fora such as Diynot, so I'm not sure where you're coming from on that one.

Cheers Richard

[Owain]

I was talking mostly about copyright implications of repurposing Usenet content under a different 'brand'

Many web fora use a signup email and CAPTCHA verification procedure so they're less anonymous and less attractive to the annoying people.

Owain

[Bernard Peek]

of people use killfiles to block any post that originates in Google Groups. It would be courteous to include a recognisable header in all of your posts that enables objectors to killfile them. Of course we hope that there will not be a need to do that.

[Bernard Peek]

It's unreliable. Usenet posts all have unique identifiers usually based on the domain-name of the poster. Replies to an existing threads should have references to the previous posts in the thread. IIRC GG attempts to thread using just the subject line and so doesn't track changes to the subject within a thread.

Look for the GNKSA which sets out best practise for Usenet clients. It goes beyong just compliance with the RFCs.

[geraldthehamster]

Well, if you use uk.diy as a Google group, setting up a GG user name and password, and logging on, is no more or less complicated, or anonymous, than doing the same for a web forum. What you're describing sounds like a weakness of Usenet ;-)

What the OP was asking about was a web gateway to uk.diy. There is already a web gateway to uk.diy, and the easiest way to direct more questions (and answers) here from web users is to suggest they use the easiest and most familiar method, rather than explaining the ins and out of Usenet clients.

Cheers Richard