Taking the Mystery Out of Web Anonymity [telecom]

It was like the old BBS's. When I ran mine I allowed posters to have handles, but I know who they were, either by telephone or other methods. I had one user who would log on make threats against other users, I'd kick him off, he would log back on as a new user and start it over again. I finally wrote a routine that checked telephone numbers against block one; he was not very smart he used the same phone number

Death of the Net predicted! Film at 11!

Weren't we just having a discussion not too long ago about the pointless (but apparently profitable) anonymous message boards some newspapers attach to every article they put online?

Usenet, frankly, works better now than it has in quite some years. There's at least an order of magnitude less spam than email (if you use competently-managed servers), and most of the obnoxious twits have found somewhere else to deposit their excreta. There are no longer viruses in the wild that use Usenet as their propagation and update mechanism.[1] The elimination of Usenet service provided by ISPs has been an enormous boon.

-GAWollman

[1] Or at least I haven't heard of any recently. I will admit that I didn't pop over to alt.comp.virus to check.

It has it's plusses and minuses. On the plus side, forcing people who want Usenet to actively seek out a Usenet service provider has hugely reduced what used to be the AOL crowd and the freshman fall crush.

On the minus side, a great deal of Usenet's value could be derived from the network effect. That is, the more participants, the more value. Unfortunately, the noise increased at a far greater rate than the signal.

The secondary loss was to Usenet redundancy and anonymity. When there were thousands upon thousands of Usenet servers, all interconnected, the loss of any one server was inconsequential. Now days, if Giganews, Newsguy or even Google Groups dropped out, there would be a noticeable loss.

Couple that with how much easier it is for a "bad" government to identify and closely monitor the point of entry for a particular poster...

It has it's plusses and minuses. On the plus side, forcing people who want Usenet to actively seek out a Usenet service provider has hugely reduced what used to be the AOL crowd and the freshman fall crush.

On the minus side, a great deal of Usenet's value could be derived from the network effect. That is, the more participants, the more value. Unfortunately, the noise increased at a far greater rate than the signal.

The secondary loss was to Usenet redundancy and anonymity. When there were thousands upon thousands of Usenet servers, all interconnected, the loss of any one server was inconsequential. Now days, if Giganews, Newsguy or even Google Groups dropped out, there would be a noticeable loss.

Couple that with how much easier it is for a "bad" government to identify and closely monitor the point of entry for a particular poster...

I'll add that a lot of today's users do not even know about Usenet. My ISP, Cox Communications, dropped Usenet last month. So, I now use Giginews' lowest offerening to stay connected here.

Quite frankly, the aviation boards I attend use V Bulleten and are moderated. it's web browser based, and on the good ones I can post JPEGs and PDF files.

1) Could the Internet get a _truly standardized format and user interface_ (or at least "user interface elements" for bulletin boards, forums, user groups, whatever you want to call them? 2) Could someone, somewhere maintain a meaningful (and searchable) list of at least the major such bboards, fora, usergroups?

It's the fact that Usenet has those two characteristics -- and most other bboards/for/user groups don't -- that keeps me with Usenet.

Given the number of different forum software companies and the almost guaranteed parochial "my interface is best" attitudes sure to exist, I doubt it.

This to a certain degree is already happening. If you go to Google Groups (buried under the More menu now, but still alive) and search for "COCOT" for example, you will see a number of links to forum posts mixed amongst the various Usenet posts.

Duke University, where Usenet began, recently shut down its server:

I find that most of the forums using web browsers use some "common" software that I find unwieldy and, for the most part, unusable and so I don't join them.

Oddly enough, the Yahoo forums provide two simultaneous mechanisms for their forums to satisfy almost anyone:

1. email lists like Usenet that can be moderated depending how the group is setup, and
2. web-based access which, when ads/flash/java are disabled, are very easy and "comfortable" to use and is how I use Yahoo even for group moderation (linux, etc.).

As Bill (our comp.dcom.telecom moderator) wrote earlier this year, he setup a Yahoo group but it's not yet ready for prime time though it will be an excellent fallback if/when Usenet goes belly-up.

I also don't know why it's in the "finance" hierarchy instead of "tech" like all of my groups (e.g., )

:-)

That's what RSS and Atom do. They're standard formats that let you slurp entries out of any web site that's structured as a set of articles.

R's, John