Almost lost yez...

My Usenet usage is down to a trickle - this NG and two other completely
dead ones I monitor for the occasional ping.

This is down from *decades* of maintaining at least ten active groups
and a dozen special purpose ones at any time.

Then Comcast shut down their NNTP server, cutting me off completely. My
interest is no longer high enough to pay for a news server, and a quick
riffle through the lists found only very limited services for free. (I
find Google Groups a wretched, unusable mess.)

I wrote off Usenet, and this group... and then made one more check.
There's a great server, news.aioe.org, that permits open connections for
free... but has no binary groups and limits posts to 25 a day. Suits me
fine.

So I'm still here, for what it's worth.

Funny how after 25 years of increasing concatenation of discussion
channels (Fidonet and pay services like GEnie and Prodigy to Usenet), we
suddenly have a complete devolution, and there's *no* "discussion zone"
left on the internet. You have to sign up for various individual forums
on different sites, then tediously maintain your logins and
subscriptions on each, and then laboriously trek from one to the next to
maintain the discussions. No convenient "assemble your own list of
interests in one convenient reader" any more.

*Sigh*. No one really talks any more. They text at each other in blogs.

As with Amigoid, my kids have taken over the heavy use of the accounts
and play far more than my wife and me. They don't quite have the earning
power to pay for it directly but I'm happy to keep it going as a shared
family interest... and I still play, and team with whoever else is on,
regularly.

What a great game. Really.

--
= The UPDATED v1.80 Keybind, Macro & Emote Guide for I8
= is available on HEROICA! - http://www.dgath.com/coh/
= @Shenanigunner (Victory server) & the ALTGAMESCOH channel

Shenanigunner wrote:
> My Usenet usage is down to a trickle - this NG and two other completely
> dead ones I monitor for the occasional ping.
>
> This is down from *decades* of maintaining at least ten active groups
> and a dozen special purpose ones at any time.
>
> Then Comcast shut down their NNTP server, cutting me off completely. My
> interest is no longer high enough to pay for a news server, and a quick
> riffle through the lists found only very limited services for free. (I
> find Google Groups a wretched, unusable mess.)
>
> I wrote off Usenet, and this group... and then made one more check.
> There's a great server, news.aioe.org, that permits open connections for
> free... but has no binary groups and limits posts to 25 a day. Suits me
> fine.
>
> So I'm still here, for what it's worth.
>
> Funny how after 25 years of increasing concatenation of discussion
> channels (Fidonet and pay services like GEnie and Prodigy to Usenet), we
> suddenly have a complete devolution, and there's *no* "discussion zone"
> left on the internet. You have to sign up for various individual forums
> on different sites, then tediously maintain your logins and
> subscriptions on each, and then laboriously trek from one to the next to
> maintain the discussions. No convenient "assemble your own list of
> interests in one convenient reader" any more.
>
> *Sigh*. No one really talks any more. They text at each other in blogs.
>
> As with Amigoid, my kids have taken over the heavy use of the accounts
> and play far more than my wife and me. They don't quite have the earning
> power to pay for it directly but I'm happy to keep it going as a shared
> family interest... and I still play, and team with whoever else is on,
> regularly.
>
> What a great game. Really.
>

Hey Shen, glad you didn't fall off into the ether... Comcast hosed me
as well, but luckily I noticed a few suggestions in one of the RPG
newsgroups about alternates for usenet. I tried out Aioe, but found it
lagged alot (often indicating a post hadn't finished sending, when it
had in fact). I've been using motzarella.org lately, really liking it
so far.

I'm with you on the sad progression of things... Been on usenet since
the late 80s, used to spend far too much time in the Unix lab perusing
the groups. Seems like now everyone pushes RSS feeds, and as you said
they tend to "blog banter" which often ends up being a more localized
discussion, only those who know of the blogs see the text. At least
with usenet, it's a universal approach, but sadly it's dying bit by bit
these days.

I've passed the 4 year mark on CoH/V continuous subs, even though I
rarely play these days, I keep it up in case I want to drop in for a bit
- and I like to keep supporting what I think has been one of the best
MMOs to date, particularly because it's a non-standard (as in not a WoW
clone) format. I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses, and
keeping one eye towards the horizon and the coming release of a few
competitors... Champions I'm watching with a bit of trepidation, it
looks like it could be fun, but may be too "consolized" for me. Already
seeing big signs of that in the DC MMO, not sure I'll ever be drawn into
that particular universe...

--
~ CoinSpin