Also, the rec around much earlier than most other woodworking groups. At least, it was for me. Sure, there's many other groups around now, but being active in them all would mean spending your whole day just screwing around on the keyboard. Much of it overlaps at some point.
For me, I've limited myself to three. rec.woodworking, Festool owners group and I regularly look into Canadian Woodworking swap meet.
Yes, but do you want that Eternal September crowd? Before Eternal September started, I doubt there was more activity than now. I wouldn't mind if it moved toward the way it was.
As long as I can keep typing and building. john
I read about 10 different newsgroups. With the proliferation of other online sources and the dropping of Usenet by several providers, the traffic in my newsgroups has been slowly going away.
For the last week or so, this newsgroup has been the only one with posts
- not counting an occasional troller/spammer who gets through the filters.
Wonder how long this group will keep going?
Probably not very long.
A troll going by the name Harry along with a few others have destroyed two boating newsgroups. Harry is now working on Alt. Home.Repair. One of his puppets is posting on this group now. Often playing the part of a buffoon.
They will succeed here as well because usernet people cannot control themselves. The trolls simply start off topic controversial threads and the usernet people go off the deep end.
Sex, politics, religion and racism are their favorites topics. Throw in some bad language then watch the fireworks.
The trolls can be beat but it takes some will power on behalf of the users. You simply do not respond to any off topic thread regardless of how ignorant or immoral it may sound.
Mark my words and keep this thread in mind. The trolls do it for fun and there is no better target for them than a bunch of indignant old men.
LdB
O>
I use FB everyday and keep to connected to friends and family. I added in one group for awhile that was advantageous to a project I was in but dropped it quickly.
I guess if I made a separate FB account for joining a WW group it may be worth it but not personally aware of any such group that would interest me.
I have seen trolls come and go, they have been here and lost interest.
Guess we are not any fun in this group.
I am not impressed with the Facebook concept. It is bad enough on the newsgroups when people (I have done that) respond without completely reading the post they are responding to. I can image what it is like receiving a bunch of random sentences about the subject your are trying to follow.
An English teacher assigned her class to write a short story mystery using profanity, religion, politics and sex. One student handed in a paper that said simply, "My God!", said the Queen. "I wonder who did it?" He got an A.
Is that far enough off the deep end? Is this destroying ARM?
I agree with your assessments too, Karl. G+ is far superior to FB for the types of dialogs we're accustomed to here, but try as I might to get into it, it's just not doing it for me.
I haven't seen anybody here mention Reddit:
It's kind of the rage these days as the up and coming alternative to those "other" social networks, and I think it lines up pretty well as a modern alternative to newsgroups. It has all those things that I think we consider here to be advantages: anonymity (if you so choose), no "rules" (unless the creators and/or admins choose to lock it down), and a threaded discussion hierarchy (A BIG plus for me; FB and G+ annoy the hell out of me in this regard). It also has modern features that we're missing here, like integrated image hosting, and a rating system that allows you to "up-vote" or "down-vote" individual posts, which cause the higher-rated and more active threads and posts to sorta "float to the top", as it were. Pretty cool. There are literally a jillion "subreddits", and of course there is one for woodworking; check it out:
Of course, if "we" didn't find this one suitable, a "rec.woodworking" subreddit could easily be created that better fits our needs.
No interest at all, huh? I sorta expected at the very least a few replies along the lines of "That sucks!" :-)
I am one of the moderators at misc.taxes.moderated, and post there have slowed to less traffic than here.
I've lurked here since the mid-80's, and it's amazing this group is still going strong in comparison to many others. There's a population that doesn't know what usenet is and worse, think that initialisms are a teen invention for twitter. I try to teach them that IMHO, SWMBO, YMMV are all old enough to be the grandparents of these teens.
My bet? A good decade to go.
On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 19:58:53 -0400, JoeTaxpayer
Nah! It will go longer than that as long as middle agers here keep turning into old geezers like the rest of us.
At the very worst, this newsgroup might turn into retro.rec.woodworking and gain new life by doing so. :)
Actually, appears to be a workable hybrid solution.
Except for the rampant, age based, resistance to change of the inmates.
I looked at it, but saw no resemblance to a newsgroup. For what it is, it seems OK.
As for a Usenet alternative, the best I've found is to configure a Yahoo group to send me all posts as plain text via email and I then respond as needed via email. That way I need to go to the website only to view files or photos.
Go to groups.yahoo.com and type woodworking into the search box. There are pages and pages of groups, several with thousands of members.
Of course Yahoo is constantly tinkering with things, so that option my not be available forever.
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