Usenet news groups

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LittleGreyCat

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#64621 19-Jul-2010 07:22

Here in the UK we have loads of useful newsgroups on usenet.
For example 'uk.rec.gardening' and 'uk.d-i-y'.
Loads of people contribute, and we have people popping in from continental europe, the US, and Australia.

I looked at a few 'nz.' newsgroups to see if they were a useful source of information.
Mostly they were unused apart from 'nz.general' which seemed wall to wall political bitching.

Perhaps my news server isn't carrying the useful NZ news groups?

If not, what do you use to exchange information on the Internet (apart from the mighty Geekzone)?

Cheers

LGC

nate

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#353304 19-Jul-2010 11:44

LittleGreyCat: Perhaps my news server isn't carrying the useful NZ news groups?

I doubt that there are any.

Many years ago I used the news server on ihug, which must've been running on old hardware as every 10 days or so, it would crash and they would rebuild it - it became very frustrating losing all my read posts, then having to re-read them again. Eventually it was retired.

Most ISPs don't run news servers here as they aren't that popular, and are only used by the select few. I'd suggest doing a Google search for other forums which have topics you are interested in.

freitasm

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#353306 19-Jul-2010 11:46

Most New Zealand ISPs have discontinued Usenet access these days, so I guess this makes it harder for New Zealanders to use the service.

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robbyp

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#353467 19-Jul-2010 16:05

freitasm: Most New Zealand ISPs have discontinued Usenet access these days, so I guess this makes it harder for New Zealanders to use the service.

You can still use it through google groups. nz.comp used to be a big one, but generally they are very little used these days.

LittleGreyCat

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#353592 19-Jul-2010 20:22

Thanks everyone.

I've used Usenet for a long time and one major advantage is that the creation of groups is policed to avoid duplication.

These days anyone who can afford $100 a year to rent space on a virtual server can put up a standard bulletin board/discussion group web site for their favourite topic [Hi, Mauricio ;-) ]

Although this is very egalitarian it does generate a lot of background noise and it is a real pain to have to keep registering the same information for new websites.

Still, progress is progress :-)

I'm certainly getting good value from Geekzone.

Cheers

LGC

nate

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#353631 19-Jul-2010 21:32

LittleGreyCat: These days anyone who can afford $100 a year to rent space on a virtual server can put up a standard bulletin board/discussion group web site for their favourite topic [Hi, Mauricio ;-) ]

It's alittle more complicated than that (Geekzone is a beast when it comes to traffic) but you've got the general idea right :)

LittleGreyCat: I'm certainly getting good value from Geekzone.

Good time for a subscription? GZ does run much faster without ads :)

freitasm

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#353650 19-Jul-2010 21:55

LittleGreyCat: These days anyone who can afford $100 a year to rent space on a virtual server can put up a standard bulletin board/discussion group web site for their favourite topic [Hi, Mauricio ;-) ]

Dream on... Geekzone is on the top 25 New Zealand-based sites in unique visitors per month. We run our own colocated hardware. Go quote a HP DL 360 server for the hardware, add OS and database licences. Multiple this $100 of yours by 150 times and you might be close to our colocation, traffic, firewall costs. Add tax, GST, salaries.

You guys thinking any $25/month VPS can keep a site running should investigate a bit more...

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LittleGreyCat

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#353720 20-Jul-2010 04:01

freitasm:
LittleGreyCat: These days anyone who can afford $100 a year to rent space on a virtual server can put up a standard bulletin board/discussion group web site for their favourite topic [Hi, Mauricio ;-) ]

Dream on... Geekzone is on the top 25 New Zealand-based sites in unique visitors per month. We run our own colocated hardware. Go quote a HP DL 360 server for the hardware, add OS and database licences. Multiple this $100 of yours by 150 times and you might be close to our colocation, traffic, firewall costs. Add tax, GST, salaries.

You guys thinking any $25/month VPS can keep a site running should investigate a bit more...

;-) The wink was a hint that I was just pulling your leg ;-)

Yes - I know what is involved in deploying large high volume systems; I used to be in that kind of business myself.
However I have just helped to set up a Joomla system for our local chapter of the University of the 3rd Age (U3A) and we replaced a hand coded HTML system on a £20 a year ($40) server with a quite functional content management system including a bulletin board/discussion group for members on a $100 a year server.
So far so good.

So, easy to set up but a problem if you get too popular because you run out of grunt very quickly.
And TANSTAAFL.
Ours was easy to size because we know the number of members we have and the growth rate.

My main point was that it is easy to set up a small low volume site and this makes it much harder to locate the sites with the high value content.

Cheers

LGC

freitasm

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#353760 20-Jul-2010 09:04

Thanks for clarifying - but I also posted that because people reading through here might not get it, so I made it clear.

Every few days I get comments like "I'd love Geekzone with no ads" (as Nate pointed out we have a subscription option and it's fast without ads) but when we point out the subscription you get nothing. They all go to ad blockers.

Their next comment is on the basis of "it's on the Internet, it is free then. Why ads?" and obviously people have a) no idea of the volume of Geekzone traffic (we serve more than 700 thousands visits a month) b) costs of maintaining infrastructure for this volume.

So I just put it out, once again, for the sake of those who read these pages later and miss that ";)"

Back to newsgroups... When Paradise had the newsgroups around I used the nz.comp for a while. But pretty much it. Also used to go to some microsoft.* newsgroups (the ones related to Windows Mobile) but they have now migrated to web-based forums.

I still access two private Microsoft newsgroups, but that's pretty much my NNTP use these days.

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dman

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#354128 20-Jul-2010 19:25

freitasm:
LittleGreyCat: These days anyone who can afford $100 a year to rent space on a virtual server can put up a standard bulletin board/discussion group web site for their favourite topic [Hi, Mauricio ;-) ]

Dream on... Geekzone is on the top 25 New Zealand-based sites in unique visitors per month. We run our own colocated hardware. Go quote a HP DL 360 server for the hardware, add OS and database licences. Multiple this $100 of yours by 150 times and you might be close to our colocation, traffic, firewall costs. Add tax, GST, salaries.

You guys thinking any $25/month VPS can keep a site running should investigate a bit more...

you can go even cheaper than $100... I run a niche site that is just for Aucklanders into certain stuff, it runs off a server in the garage (cost: 0) and use a .com domain name (US$10). Total cost = practically nothing

Then again, this is somewhat smaller than geekzone. We have over 600 registered users, which is far short of geekzone.

But yeah, I can imagine the effort it takes to run geekzone and thanks again for it all! :)

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sleemanj

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#354193 20-Jul-2010 21:26

Usenet in the nz.* groups died.... probably about 8 years ago really, and the reason I think is simple - TradeMe (www.trademe.co.nz) and it's message boards. There's probably a few stalwarts still throwing stones at each other, but apart from that.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to sell or buy something on the internet in NZ, you'd put it in nz.wanted, and this was a good draw into the other groups, once TradeMe got going, nz.wanted dried up, and once TradeMe got it's message boards going, the rest of nz.* went with it.

Now, the defacto discussion area for the general NZ population - TradeMe message boards. With a few niche areas like Geekzone etc.

Be warned if you venture into the TradeMe message boards however, the average IQ outside of the "Computers" board... not exactly through the roof, but the political polarism is practically off the scale, when you combine largely stupid people with political "debate"... it's mind numbing to say the least.

---
James Sleeman
I sell lots of stuff for electronic enthusiasts...

jtbthatsme

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#354264 20-Jul-2010 23:21

I agree with that comment the TradeMe forums are terrible my exwife used to use them a lot but she too started to go off them as most of them turned into b1tch sessions and she even said she felt her iq was going down from reading some of them hehe.

However in the big picture i would have to agree most local sites were effected by trademe. You only have to check the New Zealand web traffic stats to see how much of a impact Trademe does have.

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nate

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#354270 20-Jul-2010 23:25

sleemanj: Be warned if you venture into the TradeMe message boards however, the average IQ outside of the "Computers" board... not exactly through the roof, but the political polarism is practically off the scale, when you combine largely stupid people with political "debate"... it's mind numbing to say the least.