Catch up

Not for a good couple of years now, I think he's still in the business, others have probably had contact with him "off list"

Geoff is well and so is CET.

Hi Adam. I recall you used to post entertaining cctv occasionally. Are your neighbours still creating enjoyment? :-)

In message , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

Posted as Radon or Raden?

Interesting to be reminded of names, sometimes. Makes me realise that regulars are suddenly no longer posting, and I do wonder why. Not just here, but other groups and forums.

Andy Hall of course, but another chap, an old boy, who was an expert on wooden floor cleaning etc. Unusual name, which I cannot remember.

Then there was the younger lad, working with his father, renovating a barn. Seemed to be able to turn his hand to almost anything.

Grunff. Frank Irskine. Steve Firth. John Stumbles.

Just a few names that come to mind.

I used to enjoy the posts from "Mary" about bread ovens etc. Simon.

In message , sm_jamieson writes

Indeed. I'm embarrassed now, though, as doubtless I have overlooked people. I did enjoy the posts by the guy renovating the barn. He used to post fascinating images, too.

Charles (Joe) Stahelin by any chance?

Some of their accumulated wisdom has been captured in the faq and wiki of course...

Grunff, too busy building web based businesses last time I spoke to him... See

Lots of stuff by John in the Wiki, and also on his own site:

yaph.co.uk

Matthew Marks? What happened him?

Tim

Dunno, but it must be many years (10+ ?) since he posted here.

People come and go for all sorts of reasons - I've been away for chunks of time over the years.

uk.d-i-y is still an active group, but in common with other newsgroups it seems to suffering from a drop in posters. The number of people coming new to newsgroups (well text groups, binary groups might be different) is pretty small it would seem

Yes! Thank you.

Good to know others are still around, too.

In message , News writes

I view of our collective average age, some mechanism for a final sign off might be useful.

How many wives, offspring, executors are likely to know what a newsgroup is? Or that anyone here might actually care!

Other thing is anyone first looking at now would probably conclude that there is so much OT s**te that they can't be bothered wading through it to find the genuine stuff.

Heh heh.

Text only mediums are not, apparently, what the public want. They need to be able to post pics.

Cormaic the Paving Expert, Ed Sirrett et al

In message , Tim Lamb writes

Interesting point. My wife used to use Usenet 10+ years ago. Son, now

There is more to it than that, though. Most of us probably provide at least basic password protection for our various devices, including laptops and desktops. Do our family members know those passwords? Beyond that, most mailing lists and forums require passwords. Yes, of course, others could access through their own devices, but without access to ours, would they even know which groups we belong to or contribute to?

Yeah, but not that easy even in real life with everyone.

Cormaic, long time gone (from here) but still maintains his huge and comprehensive web site:

(also wrote a book on the subject)

Not sure what happened to Ed, he even pulled down his own site at some point - we had to rescue some of his FAQs (gas fitting, boiler repair etc, now on the wiki) from the wayback machine archive.

Kind of like a dead man's handle? If you don't check the group for 90 days it automatically posts you obituary ;-)

Indeed it is hard to tell why someone vanished... Some deaths we know about (Andy Hall, Stefek Zaba are two that spring to mind). Others like Mary Fisher just gave up posting here, but have been spotted in the real world.

Others like Christian McArdle (sp?) seemed to just vanish from usenet completely on a certain date but were if memory serves relatively young.

That could be an interesting section in a will; how to find usenet and make an announcement!

When I first started with this group it was access via trn in 1995, group was less than a year old. The WWW had not yet arrived, nobody had internet at home ...and getting access to information was not easy.

Having the forum limited to text was not particularly easy .. for example if you wanted to add a diagram it meant lots of fun using ASCII art. Linking to a picture hosting site was not an option.

Once forums became more prevalent with ease of adding pictures, diagrams, videos, etc ... the use of Newsgroups diminished. Several I use have massively reduced in volume of posts.

There are now several on line UK DIY forums with easily used gui access ....... some are useful, some have become a business in their own right, funded by adverts.

This group initially had almost zero spam, and questions were answered or debated sometimes with humour, but the trolls did not exist .... so insults and offence did not happen.

Now you have both.