From: petertrei@gmail.com   
      
   [Also posted to r.a.sf.w]   
      
   Starting tomorrow, Google will no longer support new Usenet content.   
   This is probably the last post I will make through GG.   
      
   What a long strange trip its been. I've been on Usenet since the early 80s.   
   At that time, though certainly some people kept private archives, most   
   regarded Usenet content as ephemeral as toilet paper - once it aged off   
   your server, it was gone.   
      
   Those were the days when the most popular external storage medium   
   was the 1.44 Mb floppy, and hard drives cost big bucks. As we all know,   
   storage now approaches free, and you buy it by the Terabyte. That changed   
   things.   
      
   In 1995, Dejanews started offering the first web-accessible, public archives.   
   I recall a certain amount of gnashing of teeth, since now people could   
   be confronted with things they'd said years before. How right they were!   
   It actually happened to me in a couple of job interviews.   
      
   In 2001, Google acquired the Dejanews archive. This was back in the   
   days when Google's slogan was 'Don't be evil', and for quite a long time   
   they were good stewards. But was time moved on, it wasn't kept up;   
   search was gradually enshittified, original headers and format   
   concealed, and gaps appeared in the archive.   
      
   More recently, complaints about spammers have been ignored, or   
   even worse, reportedly led to groups being dropped.   
      
   In the last month, rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.sf.fandom, and some   
   other groups have been made unusable via GG due to a spammer   
   who robo-posts Thai language spam at the rate of several new threads   
   a minute, completely burying any real content.   
      
   Google has done nothing, though its imminent shutdown of GG will   
   prevent it leaking to the rest of usenet.   
      
   Its the spammer, not the shut down, that drove me from GG to   
   eternal-september a few weeks ago rather than today.   
      
   GG has been very useful to me, since it could get through my   
   employer's firewall, unlike NNTP. Now I'm retired, and can use   
   NNTP again from home. I'll miss GG, even though I   
   easily concede that its interface has become terrible.   
      
   pt   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)