[ih] net news

[Kevin Bowling]

On Fri, May 8, 2026 at 10:24 AM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, May 8, 2026 at 6:53 AM Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond via
> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 08/05/2026 09:48, Sivasubramanian M via Internet-history wrote:
> > > If you need help in figuring out how to backfill everything, may be
> > > archives.org could help, if they receive a nice request.
> >
> > FWIW:
> > https://archive.org/details/usenet
>
> The quality of this versus just reading from the commercial providers
> John Levine mentioned doesn't look favorable.  So that covers 2003+.
> But as Ofer states, 2003+ usenet is perhaps less valuable than pre
> 2000s usenet.  I still can't think of a better option than spidering
> Google to get all that, and it will have to be done somewhat
> circumspect to avoid getting blocked.  Ideally someone could liberate
> the data from Google but they've not been cooperative in any way
> lately, their service basically killed the remaining text feeds when
> they decided not to use their own spam and bot prevention code and let
> Google Groups fester for two years before finally turning off write
> access.  I'm open to actionable ideas and people with influence on the
> situation.

One big downer: I haven't looked at this in a number of years and now
it looks like Google removed the "Show original message" option (it is
visible but disabled) for Usenet posts and probing the endpoints is
unsuccessful.  Without that, I'd have to synthesize message IDs, fake
emails, and lose all the other headers.  Not a show stopper but
definitely a setback, data lossage, and maybe something I'd want to
feed into a second lower quality index.

https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical seems to be the "best"
public archive easily found, I can't find many details about how it
was produced, just a thread like this:
http://csiph.com/group/comp.sys.apple2/a/yr6DN.471305%24xHn7.445904@fx14.iad

With that and the UTZOO collection I'd have something plausible for
historical research but it is a shame Google has locked away the rest.

> > Kindest regards,
> >
> > Olivier
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