Graeme Wall wrote:
On 13/10/2020 18:47, Scott wrote:
On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 11:32:43 -0000 (UTC), Recliner
wrote:

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote:
Or you could just use a different news server. Usenet is a distributed system
and thankfully, Google does not control it, they just offer access. I was able
to add uk.railway from astraweb and downloaded over 1m headers.

Spam in unmoderated Usenet groups has been around since the beginning of time.
The traditional way of dealing with it is a newsreader than offers reasonable
keyword and baysean filtering.

Unfortunately there are people who think that usenet groups are part of
Google Groups, and not something that existed long before Google was
invented. So when GG cuts off access to a usenet group, because of all the
drug spam that was being injected via GG, those people think the group is
dead and gone, hence the misleading title of this thread.

My sense of history is that Usenet predated the Internet.


ITYM Usenet predated the World Wide Web


Yes, I was accessing usenet before the Web, more than 25 years ago. In the
early days of the Web, of course, there wasn't much available, and it was
hard to find. No one search engine could find everything, so I had a group
search utility that fired off searches on half a dozen different engines,
then aggregated and ranked their results. All via dial-up, of course. It
made each search a project in its own right