I've been spending some time looking for a new portal to access Usenet, as we've been discussing. Before registering anywhere, I thought I'd ask a question or two.
Motzarella.org has become eternal-september.org. On the home page, it is pretty clear that it supports *text* groups. Is anyone still using this, and if so can you still access abpo?
Bignews.usenetmonster.com: I can find it, but it takes a loooonnnng time to download the home page. I stopped waiting after about 60 seconds. Is this normal, or is there a glitch today?
I tried both teranews and motzarella last summer when my ISP was messed up; neither worked and neither seems to have any tech assistance - or at least any that would respond to queries and requests for help.
I gave up. Eventually my ISP got itself figured out, and I have newsgroup access again.
We all sign up on facebook and join the growing orchid community there.
The mystery group I read has a growing group of mystery fans there too. I have no idea how well this works, but am tempted. I worry about the timesuck factor.
Actually, Facebook can be better than that; we could have our own group. One of our society members set up a restricted Facebook group for us. You can't join it unless an admin okays you. He made me an admin, and I get reminders when a member wants to sign up for the group. From what I know so far, you can assign anyone to be an admin.
Then you have your own board, where anyone who is in the group can start or participate in threads, post pictures, etc. And no spam. You don't have to do all the junk that is available on Facebook (*what kind of animal are you?*; *so and so wants to add your birthday to his calendar*, etc.). We could use it purely as a message/binaries posting center. It's not the wild west that Usenet is, but we can allow others to join.
I'm new to it, and I'm not familiar with how to set up a restricted group. But hey, how hard can it be?
Diana, it's time for me to come out from the shadows. I have followed the usenet orchid groups for many years. I just chose not to participate for a variety of reasons. My wife, SuE, was an active participant for many years but lately has been silent. While I still have usenet access thru my isp, I also subscribe to Giganews (very reliable and has GREAT retention). I pay about $10 / month.
Kye is very generous. Do you really think that his cost is zero. I'm not sure it's fair for him to subsidize all of us, but that's his decision.
The larger problem, as I see it, is that using Kye's group (not part of usenet) or a restricted Facebook group will severely restrict any participation by new orchid growers. They will not know where to go for information. If the intent is to keep this a private club, with minimal new participation, then this is the way to go. But, if we want to grow the hobby, we must make the discussions visible to all that are interested.
I don't know what is the long term future of usenet, but it's still here. Many folks may need to pay for access but that is their decision. Free options are around with limitations.
John Ericks> Actually, Facebook can be better than that; we could have our own group. One
Post URL to picture or group of pictures and description of it here.
Discussion happens here.
Just because you post the picture on flikr doesn't mean it gets discussed on flikr. In fact, I'd generally not recommend discussing flikr photos on flikr. They're a great image dump site, they suck for communications.
And for me, facebook is *NOT* an option. I don't have the time to sufficiently falsify a persona for every activity I might possibly want to do on facebook. I don't want my real information anywhere near facebook as the owner of any application on facebook gets full access to your information. For added joy... deleting something from facebook doesn't actually delete it. It generally just marks it to not automatically stick it into a link or image tag on your page. If someone has the absolute URL to it it's like it was never deleted.
My wife and kids use it, and my conclusion is "It embraces every reason I never set foot on my highschool since I graduated."
eternal-september.support and motzarella.support both exist on news.eternal-september.org The fellow behind eternal-september.org regularly reads those newsgroups and is quite patient at helping folks that actually manage to setup a new newserver/user profile in their newsreader and make it to the server. He also puts some fairly explicit instructions for most newsreaders on his website (I know, I had to use them for slrn).
The only thing he doesn't do is give a quick tutorial on checking to see if it's working by hand. And here's one. Works from the shell prompt of any OS with a telnet client. On Windows that would be a cmd.exe window or a command.com window.
telnet newsserver 119 If you see something like
Connected to news.eternal-september.org. Escape character is '^]'.
200 news.eternal-september.org InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.5.0 ready (posting ok)
or
Connected to news.teranews.com. Escape character is '^]'.
Now teranew is a slight pain in the butt that they require auth for reaching their support newsgroup.
I type "group teranews.support" and hit enter and get
480 Authentication Required
There's a nice check box in the thunderbird newsserver configuration that says something like "ALWAYS USE AUTHENTICATION." Check it. Glub only knows why it isn't automatically checked if you give it a username and password. Glub also only knows why when username and password change it doesn't immediately assume that it needs to re-retrieve the entire grouplist again. However, Ray was kind enough to explain that in his thunderbird instructions.
And. . . .. .. . .. only the shadow knows! *G* Dear John, Glad to hear from you & how is Sue doing? Please tell her that we miss her. Cheers Wendy(Who knocks on wood every day because my binaries News Groups still work!)
For too long there was no orchid chatter - then taxes, and GC (only 1 Wendy) got in the way. If you all stay here and start the discussion again - I will try to get back in the habit. I do miss the 'family'. Anyone heard from Reka? SuE
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