End of Eternal September predicted film at 11

YOu obviously haven't seen what google is doing.

They took over dejanews's archive some years back, and while I thought their calling it "google groups" was dangerous, it was just the newsgroup archive.

But in December, they added their own "groups" to the mix (well, it had been there for a year, but in "beta"). The new interface is clearly arranged for their "groups" and isn't so great for the Usenet archive.

More important, they aren't making a very clear distinction between Usenet and "groups", letting people fall into the newsgroups without even knowing where they are.

The default is not to quote the message being replied to.

Even more damaging is that they've not put in the ability to reply to any message in the quarter century old archive, when before you could not reply to any message older than a month.

So some clueles kid searches for a topic, and replies to a message, either not noticing that it's months or years old, or not caring. They don't know that Usenet isn't on some webpage somewhere, so they have no clue that anyone reading their message will not have the context of the message.

It's getting pretty messy in some newsgroups.

For the first time in quite some years, I'm seeing "make money fast" posts (admittedly they probably have been posted all along, but my ISPs in recent years have been pretty good about getting rid of them, and dejanews and google had been good about not archiving them. I've seen an instance or two of "Mrs. Field's Cookie recipe". Clearly this is fallout of google's new arrangement.

THis is bothersome enough. But given that google is an archive, we now have the equivalent of graffiti on historical monuments. google made big fuss about historical posts when they got the old archive from some independent sources in 2001, but those messages have become targets of vandals. Linus Torvald's message to the minix newsgroup about Linux, is now followed by juveniles scoring points by replying to it, over a decade later. ANd it would appear that one of them was not content to simply post a reply, but they posted about the timeline on slashdot, which then made the rounds as if this was news.

I've had some newsgroup access since late 1994. Either I missed the whole AOL first attack, or it wasn't as bad as it is pictured. But this new google thing is the most damaging thing to the newsgroups that I've seen.

Michael