Re: Goodbye with mixed feelings

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.

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.

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.

Nor am I . There are too few here who actually post , much less useful information . You leaving makes that one less positive contributor in the group . FWIW , Mozilla Thunderbird and eternal-september news server are a free and easy to configure combination . And both are free .

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.

It has been a long time ago since I signed up with Block.News, bought

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.

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

It's like going to the zoo Fran, Please don't feed the animals. Sheldon has been floating around UseNet since the nineties trying to start arguments.

So's Sara and the late Billy.

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.

Amen. I think I started in 1990 or close to it, seems like forever. Some of the newsgroups I've been on were taken over by the crazies and I moved on to something else. There are still a few that aren't full of stuff that is irrelevant.

Threatened rain this morning but, alas, it moved off somewhere else. Winter garden doing well and the !@#$% sweet peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant planted in early spring are still putting on fruit. I chopped and froze about five lbs of sweet peppers yesterday. May not need to grow anymore next year, Nah! I like them fresh too.

Agreed. FB is a PITA.

I know Sheldon well. He and I used to both post in a group called misc.rural many years ago. He hasnt'changede and is always the same. A curmudgeon who has neat lawns and likes powered equipment.

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.

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...

Investorvillage offers the equivalent of kill files.

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

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.