Who is posting on uk.d-i-y?

[Tony Bryer]

about 2,500 posts per month, now it's four times that - half a million or so posts in that time according to my newsreader. And, no, me joining and the message growth are not related

[Doctor Drivel]

Wow! 16,000 senile, babbling, nonsensical ramblings. I blame Thatcher.

[Roger]

The message from Tony Bryer contains these words:

Dribble must take much of the blame for the increase. IIRC he came on the scene (as Adam) early in 2000.

[Lobster]

The data of course don't reflect individuals' activity, just the number of posts from specific posting addresses, and most people change these for various reasons over the years.

Out of interest, can anyone tell me why it is that if you look at the data for virtually all of 1995 on the above link, when uk.d-i-y records "began" - the number of posts was less than 30 per month, which is clearly rubbish. Why have all the posts from back then got lost? Does anyone remember when the ng started? I know I've been posting since day

1, yet the earliest of mine I can find is Nov '95 (God where has my life gone?!)

David

[Andrew Gabriel]

The postings probably never got saved anywhere in the first place. Google was asking for copies of archives anyone had laying around. It's possible I have archives from the newsgroup back then, but it means firing up some really old systems are searching around on them, and they won't be complete archives even over the limited time ranges I might have. I did start making a full archive when deja-news started going down the pan (reduced history to only the last year), before google bought them and got it all working again.

[Chris Bacon]

No. He would not have posted thousands of articles if people did not stupidly respond. The same goes for uk.e.c, and other groups which have their own Drivels - and their own version of Drivel's band of blinkered, sycophantic harris lickers and mutual winkers. It is shameful that it continues.

[Doctor Drivel]

Because mine are clearly the best.

[Chris Bacon]

Well, they most certainly seem to have *something* - I notice that all *sorts* of people, even "Roger" are still feeding you in absolutely *grand* style.... well done!

[Ed Sirett]

Looks like Andrew and I are the only ones who had the same address in the last century as now.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well I have only been here as snipped-for-privacy@b.c

Not sure how long - 4 years maybe.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I had to change from argonet as they closed that side of the business.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Do you also get 1300 junk emails/day?

I used to post as "sadg" (it was my userid at GEC). I can see some of those around 1995 on google, and that seems to be as far back as google goes in any of the newsgroups I used at the time.

[Tony Williams]

Mine is a 1996-ish address, (never munged), and yes I do get several hundred junk emails per day. Most used to be to tonyw@ but in recent years it looks like spammers have changed to harvesting addresses from the Article-ID's of usenet postings.

[Huge]

My demon address (at least 10 years old) peaked at several hundred an hour. I'm behind several layers of antispam, now, and it's dropped to 3 or 4 a day, usually phishing and fake lotteries. I no longer have access to my Xerox PARC address which I was using before the Internet was called that...

That's because article IDs have commercial "at" (@) signs in them. They're never valid email addresses so, so harvesting them is pointless. Most spam harvesting these days is from web pages - spammers have lost interest in Usenet along with everyone else.

[Ed Sirett]

I used to but when demon introduced filtering (Bright Mail) a couple of years ago it was reduced to a few a day. Since then it's been creeping steadily backup again. Now I'm getting 10-20 a day but Popfile easily and accurately pre-sorts them.