Usenet going bye bye

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Ty,

Something I had to learn about back when I was running a public BBS was
something called the "AOL Ruling".

If you monitor and control the content of a BBS, a chat room, a forum, a
mailing list, etc. then you are responsible for what is in that channel,
even if you didn't catch it.  If you do _any_ monitoring or filtering, you
become responsible for _all_ of the content.

If you _don't_ monitor or censor it, then you are not liable for any
illegal content there (it is understood that you will remove anything
illegal if notified of it).

This is why TW and the rest of the providers are taking a "shotgun"
approach, whether it's removing all of the "alt" groups where the majority
of offenses are found, or removing the whole thing.

As to running a Usenet relay - it's a very expensive thing to do.  It's a
LOT of data and a LOT of traffic.  Most usenet servers, I believe, are
still run on multi machine clusters.  This is why subscriptions are so
high, why ISP's are eager to shed the burden, and why you don't find local
guys who used to run BBSs running their own Usenet servers.

Compared to the amount of benefit that any small group of users like our
LUG would get, the traffic of a Usenet server would mostly be wasted - but
it would cost a lot.