Usenet

From Dar

Big 8 MB

Membership of the Big-8 Management Board

http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=faqs:b8mb

Google Groups and usenet

Google inherited a Usenet archive of posts that was decades old from DeJa News. Then to be competitive with Yahoo Groups it developed Google Groups using their web interface to Usenet. Herein lies the confusion with many.

Usenet via NNTP requires the use of an NNTP news reader. Netscape, Mozilla, Outlook Express, Forte Free Agent, MT-Newswatcher (Macintosh) are just some of the programs. You need access to an NNTP server to use these programs. Google does not offer this. Its web interface is all that is available for access to Usenet groups.

Usually Usenet access comes with your Dial-up/DSL/Broadband account in many cases, but an increasing number of services are dropping it - AOL for example dropped it last February which forced many of their users to Google for the web interface to Usenet. You'd need the settings published by your internet service provider for your news reader program. Alternately, Usenet access can be purchased as a seperate service from places such as Supernews, GigaNews, TeraNews, and many others.

Google's private groups use the same web interface as is used for Usenet access. Google's private groups which are not Usneet do not propagate outside of the Google system.

The creation of Usenet groups is a detailed process that is not easily accomplished and even if successful in getting some servers someplaces to carry one, the "official" list that were properly created is increasingly the gold standard and rogue groups are summarily ignored.

Google's private groups will never be propagated outside of Google. That would create chaos in Usenet given that anyone can create agroup at anytime. As it stands there is a moratorium on the creation of new groups in the "Big-8" hierarchy and even ALT groups are being created in a limited fashion these days. A new Usenet team is re-writing some of the methods by which new groups will be honored and by which some existing ones will eventually be killed off or changed in some way.

It's not true about the moratorium. Wjat seems to have happened is that the previous public voting system has been replaced by a small management committee (B8MB) which may have had the effect of making group creation easier or harder, depending on the proposal.

What I would like to see is a totally seperate interface to Usenet from that of the private groups, or at least seperate them so people know the difference. Way too many people think Google is Usenet and vice versa - though that might be an underlying desire of Google's? A speculation certainly.

DMK ( URL http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Groups-Basics/browse_thread/thread/3c89010de5d272c4/# )