What happened to this grooup?

There are dozens (if not hundreds) of posts a day on the LUGNet.com discussion forums.

Many Usenet discussion groups have had their audiences dwindle away in favor of web-based discussion sites. In LUGNet's case, their server allows both NNTP (Usenet client) access and web-browser access to the same message database. This is an outgrowth of the fact that the LUGNet founders were very Usenet-savvy and participated in RTL back in the day.

Kevin

I don't think they like the NNTP readers any more. I use WinVN and get a "connection refused" message when I have tried to connect recently.

As far as I can tell from their web site, I have all the proper settings, and I have been able to acces it in the past.

They recently had a denial of service (DOS) attack and closed the primary port for NNTP, I am using port 8000 with few problems currently.

I can't tell you how to change ports on WinVN...

Read this to get NNTP readers working again -- they don't hate them!

-Jordan Bradford

People abandoned the public newsgroup for a private site.

Personally, I think it's a pain having to approve every newsgroup post.

They do have it divided out nicely by category, but much as with Usenet at large, people simply crosspost everywhere all the time.

So it really just moves discussions out of the public domain. Personally, I usually just discuss things here if I have a comment or question - and I usually get my answer.

Thanks, I can now access the Lugnet newsgroups.

Thanks for all the responses! I had forgotten about lugnet. I looked at it last night and see that it has become a pretty amazing resource. I am sure I will be spending some time there.

Thanks again!

Tom

This is one advantage of using the web to access it; if you're logged in no approval is required. The web interface is actually one of the nicest discussion group interfaces I've encountered.

Al least it is fully archived, unlike most web forums. The entire message database since inception is accessible.

Kevin

I've seen much better (for example):

And even that example isn't as flexible as the NNTP standard which at the very least allows access to a variety of news readers, along with a more responsive interface, and the ability to respond to posts offline.

rec.toys.lego is also fully archived by several sources (most notably Google Groups (which was once DejaNews).

Lugnet's archive could only possibly go back as far as (could it be 6 years ago tomorrow?) this post:

The Google archive goes back as far as 1/10/1994. It includes 110,000 messages that aren't in the Lugnet archive.

I guess it depends on your definition of "fully archived".

Group-level threaded display is certainly the first thing I would add to Lugnet if I could.

However, no offense, but, are you kidding? I played with this for a few minutes and was not impressed at all. I didn't see any way to display the entire contents (bodies) of a thread all at once on one page. Tell me if I missed something. This is something that not even my favorite NNTP clients can do. (Granted there are only a couple decent ones on the Mac.)

I find the display options on Lugnet are top-notch. I can look at messages, whether in groups or threads, by title, by extract, or long lists of full bodies. The extract stuff strips out quoted material, so I get a better extract than, say, on Google. (Though I like Google's side-by-side thread display.)

Compare against this:

Display of 50 latest messsage to lugnet.general, by title:

(This is the URL-style I use to check my favorite groups on Lugnet. I wish this were readily visible on the site to newcomers, I don't find the default newsgroup display very useful.)

Same, by extract:

(notice elision of quoted text and URLs)

Same, in toto:

Entire thread display:

Same, in brief:

Single message display from the above thread, with extracts from the parent, and all children:

I *wish* my NNTP client was this cool.

Which Lugnet supports. Does any other community website do that? It's certainly very uncommon.

I thought it was pretty clear from context that I meant Lugnet itself is archived, esp. since I said "unlike most web forums." Most web forums, esp. those centered on something like a hobby, eventually expire the vast majority of the posted messages.

I don't like the privatization of public discussion very much either (though it has its pluses, notably content control), but Lugnet is one of the premiere examples out there.

Kevin

From what I've seen, you have to post your message, then wait for it to arrive via email, then approve it, etc.

What a pain.

They could just reqire a username and password for NNTP access - instead of their crackpot authentication scheme for every email.

It's clearly better than Yahoo Groups, if that's what you're saying.

It is true that Lugnet is the best run of any private discussion forum I've ever seen. By fixing a few minor issues in the TOS and with NNTP functionality, I'd have to drop all objection to it.

I totally agree, that is very unwieldy.

I think Lugnet is more anal about security than they need to be, in general -- e.g. the very strict rules about passwords, which virtually gauarantees that one can't memorize them, nor re-use passwords from other sites. Lugnet provides more user-content features -- it's not "just" a discussion board -- for which higher security makes sense, but it's still much harsher than similar sites out there.

I frequent several other toy-related boards (none on Yahoo) and none that I can think of have full archives. Some do "archive" popular/useful threads, meaning a moderator flags them and sometimes moves them into a "vault" section. But large chunks of content go off into the ether after a few months.

This is not necessarily an awful thing; many web-based forums are very chatty, and the contents of many threads is not worth any extraordinary effort to save. You're depending on the editorial acumen of the moderators, of course.

Manufacturer websites (Art Asylum, Palisades Toys, etc.) are especially bad about nuking content. This serves their purposes (they're not in the business of archiving this stuff), but potentially some good reference material is lost this way. There's also the possibility -- very real, it's happened -- that the whole board gets dumped when the company gets bought, or they decide to change internal tools, or makeover the website, or whatever. The nice thing about Lugnet and some other fan-based sites is that the fact they are fan-based makes them less susceptible to being tossed out the window. Esp. once a community builds up -- if Lugnet's owners lost interest or ability, someone (actually many someones) would step forward to maintain or outright procure the content.

Kevin

The way WebTv has it set up, this is the best and easiest way to post to a forum. When you log on at the home page there is a button that says "Discuss", just click and type Lego and im here. It's only one of the "few" perks of using WebTv. I would come here using my computer but i heared it costs money to use usenet and figured why pay when i can use it with my WebTv/MSN1 Plan subscription for free. How much does it cost to use usenet?

solar

It depends on your ISP (Internet Service Provider). If you only want discussion groups like this one, most ISPs provide them for free. If you want binary groups (downloadable pictures, music, movies, etc.) then often you will find that you need to pay extra (buy a 3rd party news service such as Supernews.com, etc.)

My experience that is local, smaller ISPs provide much better Usenet support than larger, national ISPs like Earthlink, etc.

One other note: Google provides complete access to discussion groups at

So, even if your ISP has poor Usenet support, with any ISP you can always access Usenet using Google.com.

Hope that helps,

Kevin "support your local ISP" Johnston

Thanks for the info Kevin, i will look into it a little more on my computer. The only problem i have had using WebTv in the discussion/newsgroups is quoting peoples comments. I know how to CCP a sentence or 2 to quote someone but not the whole post. Thanks again for the info...

solar

What newsreader software do you have on your PC?

That im not certain of, although i know i can post to the newsgroups using passport with my MSN name on my WebTv. The whole thing still confuses me..LOL...

solar

Well, if you have Internet Explorer, you probably have Outlook Express.

It's free, fairly easy to use, and makes replying easy.

It also allows you to "Watch" conversations - and to set the "Followup-to:" field - for redirecting replies to a new newsgroup. You should give it a try.