Where is everyone?

In message snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org>, at 18:41:27 on Fri, 8 May 2026, AnthonyL snipped-for-privacy@please.invalid remarked:

But uk.legal.moderated is still thriving (disclaimer: I'm one of the mods).

Pensioners going SKIing is really common now.....

(SKI = Spending Kids Inheritance)

Main driver is the 40% IHT on pension savings from April 2027..........

Indeed, well it's in use anyway. It used to restrict posts for legal matters often with erudite responses. Now most non-spam posts seem to be permitted as a result of the demise of uk.legal.

And as I said earlier, ChatGPT regurgitates posts from there as if they were authoritative.

Bandar Logic...

"We all say it, so it must be true"

In the DIY spirit, is there any decent forum software that is useable and a bit usenet like? We could always host it ourselves...

Dunno. On most forums I've visited the software seems totally incapable of threading messages properly.

Yes, but if you withdraw it now, you're likely to have to pay 40% income tax on most of it anyway.

Only if you're a higher rate tax payer* and whatever you draw down takes you over the c.£50k threshold?

Although quite a few variations on the theme - having looked into it all recently.

• 40%+ band has increased from 2.5% in 2015 to 8.5% today (AI).

well that can be mitigated as pension schemes allow you to take a 25% tax free lump sum, you can then take £50,270 per year before then being hit by 40% tax.

You can actually mitigate a bit more as you could then pay into the pensions of your children, they would get 20% tax rebated into their pension. Even if you gift over the annual gifting allowance and die within 7 years, you've only effectively paid 20% overall tax as that original 40% IHT is mitigated by the 20% tax credit the pension account holder got.....

If you have a younger spouse with a smaller pension pot or in a low paid part time job, then theres another opportunity ther as although estates left to married spouses is free of IHT, they would get a 20% tax credit to their pension.

Also you can invest in qualifying AIM shares. As long as you hold them for a minimum of 2 years, the effective IHT tax rate on AIM shares is 20%.

HomeOwnersHub?

More seriously, there are two problems, the tech and the people. I've heard some Usenet groups like uk.rec.motorcycles decamp to Facebook but a) it's Facebook, b) it's Facebook, c) actually reading posts is a PITA between all the FB junk (and slimy spying), d) it needs people to use it. Too many times have people said 'I just made a new group for X on platform Y' and it dies because the people don't go there. Build it and they don't come.

Another challenge is that Usenet is not a single group. I have about 500 groups in my feed - many of them are dormant, but some aren't and occasionally others pop into life. If the folks of various groups all decamp to different platforms, now I have multiple platforms to keep track of. This scales very badly. Plus they're inherently slower to use - lots of fetching of webpages, especially with all the cruft that comes with that (images, ads, etc). I skim the whole of my 500 groups in a few minutes (not reading all the posts, obviously).

Plus a lot of 'platforms' are run by a corporate overload who doesn't care about the quality of the discussion, they just want clicks. This is why it's so hard to search FB Marketplace, as they would rather you spend ages hunting rather than just showing you want you wanted and leaving.

I've messed about with Reddit (sometimes good info, but too much noise over signal) and diy.stackexchange.com (assumes everyone is in the USA) - neither really make me want to go back.

I still think that the tech is easier to fix by somebody building a good Usenet web client - now you can compile web versions of desktop apps, maybe something can be converted? But it would probably make Usenet's SNR go down, as with Google Groups - and Usenet is not really very good in the face of abuse. Plus AI bots are starting to show up and interfere with discussions, and that is cause for concern.

Theo

Supporters of our League Two football club got fed up of outages and uncontactable mods on the general football boards and have set up, with great effect, their (our) own board using

But then that becomes yet another place to go, whereas several/many interests can be followed/unfollowed/watched on Usenet.

Though there is nothing to stop more topics being added to Proboards. The fooball board hesitated with subscriptions until the original main board became inaccessible and now has grown, within a year, to larger and more useful than the longstanding original board.

Maybe a usenet server itself? You wouldn't have to peer it with any other servers if you didn't want to, and by now they should be pretty bulletproof (or at least better than some random web- forum suite).

#Paul

Yes, but the amount you withdraw is added to your income for tax puposes

- and may well make you a 40% tax payer unless there's not very much in the pension pot or you withdraw it over a number of years. Even so, depending on your basic income, the extra income from the pension drawdown may reduce the amount of interest you can receive tax-free from other investments.

But that's £50k TOTAL income before paying 40%tax - not £50 from the pension fund if you've got other income. If you *haven't* got other income, you probably won't want to deplete your pension pot!

Yup that would be doable, but would suffer the same problem as usenet proper - it is not that easy to access if you are new to the concept, so you are unlikely to get many new users. Something web based would be easier to find and use causally. The difficulty is replicating the speed and thread management of usenet.

I still find this NG to be interesting and useful, but I also now use

Exactly.

You can rent a virtual server for relative peanuts and run an NNTP server on it and only give away logins to it to the exalted few.

It is YOUR private moderated (if you choose) server .

You don't have to 'withdraw' it. 30-year gilts are now yielding over

Cough. You need to add your state pension on to your withdrawals to test for the £50,270 limit. It really isn't 'tax free' as a lot of stupid people seem to think.

And run a greater risk of total loss on AIM shares. Only a handful are good investments.