A USENET forum to discuss Livejournal

[darksumomo]

Here's a heads-up for my flist.  There is currently a proposal in front of the Big-8 Management Board for the creation of new newsgroups (text-only forums for the discussion of various topics that can be accessed through Google Groups  for all of us with just a web browser, or through news servers such as Motzarella for those of us with newsreaders

Comments

[dogemperor]

Heh, I'm not shocked ol' Tim Skirvin is proposing this :3 (Seriously, he always was one of the more likable folks in the net.abuse community...largely because he gave a shit on things as a regular joe).

I may well have to meander over there and give my support :3

[darksumomo]

I have no problem with Skirvin as a person, and I think he's done a lot of good. However, he's behaving in a way that is seriously pissing off some of the old USENET hands, particularly those who like the idea of USENET as the world's largest (or only) functioning anarchy. It doesn't help that he's one of my predecessors as Friendly Neighborhood Vote Wrangler of alt.usenet.kooks, which means that he's immune from awards, and that most of the people pissed off at him are current AUK regulars. That puts me in the middle, a position I don't much care for.

[dogemperor]

Ah...fun with news.groups politics, I see :P (As much as was possible, I tried to stay the hell out of it--I would have thought that the death of the net.* 2.0 hierarchy (where there was an attempt to essentially set up a Usenet 2.0 with only vouched-for sites with strong antispam policies as members--it never really took off, and I left Usenet shortly afterwards) would have shown the ultimate futility of the cat-herding of Usenet as a whole. In fact, I think honestly it would be easier to herd cats than Usenet as a whole :D)

The last I really dealt with AUK was back in the mid-90s (back in the days of John Grubor and the Two Steves (Steve Boursy and Steve Winter) as supreme kooks of all Usenet), so I can't speak on the politics there--I'll defer to you on that. I mostly knew him in a net.abuse role (as in having to lock down a substantial part of news.admin.net-abuse.* thanks to persistent Hipcrime attacks of joe-job spamming and, later, forged cancels and post-replacement attacks).

[darksumomo]

Trying to manage an unmoderated newsgroup, something I've attempted twice (once on rec.arts.marching.drumcorps when I did it without the benefit of a formal office and now on AUK with a formal office and more compliance from a potentially more contentious readership), is very much like herding cats. I've found only one reliable technique--throwing a piece of fresh meat in the direction I want the cats to go. The only problem is running out of meat

[nightingale0]

(most ISPs offer access to USENET)

That depends where you are. Most of the ISPs in my neck of the woods used to offer usenet access, but dropped it several years ago - that's why I now have accounts on a couple of free servers.

(alt.weblogs.live-journal is not carried by Google Groups--perhaps bugging them about it might get them to carry it)

Yet more proof that google groups is crap. The group is on shared-secrets, so I'll check it out. Thanks.

[darksumomo]

I see you posted to news.groups.proposals in support of the LJ group. Thanks!

[nightingale0]

The censorship issue is unlikely to affect me directly, but it has already affected friends. I hope you can get a few more people to speak up - good luck!

[darksumomo]

Thank you. What I find odd is that all of the comments on this post are here, and not at innocence_jihad, which has several times the number of members as are on my flist.