ISPs, Newsgroups, etc. ...OH MY!!!

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Sun, 6/29/08, Jeffrey Watts <jeffrey.w.watts at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I'm sure the rich and vibrant community on
> > rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated would be somewhat
> > insulted to discover that we're just there for the
> > "porn" (right now we're mostly there for the current 
> > "Battlestar Galactica" discussions, and the fact that 
> > JMS and other SciFi writers pop in from time to time).
> > I've seen web message boards which would be happy for 
> > 100 new interesting (the key word is "interesting") 
> > messages a week, but rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated 
> > gets over 600 a month.
> 
> Look dude, are you claiming that the majority of USENET is
> still relevant?  My wager is that only 1% is still.

I'm not saying that the majority of Usenet NEWS is relevant, but that the majority of text-based Usenet NEWS is still active enough to warrant keeping it around.  Cutting out binaries newsgroups shouldn't be that much of a problem.

I found a few statistics on Usenet News from NewsAdmin, at http://www.newsadmin.com/usenet.asp.

Yes, 0.3% of Usenet NEWS consists of text-only messages, the rest being binary file postings.  However, total Usenet NEWS traffic is 11 million messages a day.  This means that the text-only groups have a daily traffic of about 33,000 messages, or about 12,045,000 messages a year.

There is a public news server which is intentionally kept open called Aioe.org (http://news.aioe.org/).  Aioe.org allows open access only to text-only newsgroups, and no binary newsgroup access at all.  Their statistics show a consistent daily posting number of 2,000 to 3,000 posts a day just through their single Usenet News server.  Most people have access through their ISP's Usenet server and don't need the Aioe.org news server.

> Also, there is no reason why the Babylon 5 fans can't 
> move to another forum technology.  

...other than a general desire to avoid unnecessarily bloated user interfaces?  Usenet NEWS "pages" load practically instantly, don't have advertising attached to pay for the "page serving", and don't require the end user to manually switch back and forth between "no images/scripting" and "allow images/scripting".

I can't believe I'm hearing a bunch of Linux users telling me that a GUI is *always* better than a CLI.
 
> As far as your arguments about blind access, you do realize
> that you can have these boards utilize RSS to make it easier 
> on them?

Why yes, if blind users can circumvent all of the roadblocks set up between them and their access to the RSS Feed, they can then use the RSS Feed, provided their RSS Feed Reader isn't inaccessible as well.  People seem to assume that once their website has RSS, blind people can just come in and use their RSS Feed.  People frequently forget that a graphical image showing you how to use their RSS Feed, and no accompanying text information, means the RSS Feed might as well not exist as far as the blind person is concerned.

You may want to read some information from Blind People, instead of some soundbite news item that mentioned what you heard about RSS but didn't give the whole story.  The American Federation for the Blind's page on RSS Feeds and Feed Readers may enlighten you as to why your statement was only half-true (http://tinyurl.com/5crnh8).

However, RSS Feeds aren't two-way message boards, so this is somewhat immaterial to a discussion about two-way message boards.

> > The fact is that Usenet thrives (among people who may
> > not even know about the alt.binaries.* hierarchy) 
> > precisely because it is text-only.  Not everyone wants 
> > to have to upgrade to broadband just to discuss stuff 
> > on a graphics-intensive and Flash-intensive web-based 
> > message board.  If you leave out the alt.binaries.* 
> > hierarchy there's still a lot of active text-only 
> > Usenet left over, which many thousands of people still 
> > use on a regular basis.
> 
> I'm sorry man, but you can wave your stick at the kids
> on your lawn all day long, but USENET's had a death 
> sentence for a long time now.  It's about time that you 
> made your peace and moved on.

Tell you what, I'll let you in on a little secret: I'm just barely this side of being legally blind, with a good chance of reaching that point and going past it into "blind".

Thats right, I have whats known as a "personal stake" in the Internet being accessible to the blind.  I've lucked out every decade or so with new assistive contact lens technology helping keep me away from needing what you refer to as a "stick" just to get around in the real world.  My eye doctor says I might be lucky enough to avoid disabling blindness, but he can't be sure.

So quite frankly, I can't "make my peace and move on" because I'm way too close to the point where I will be one of those blind people you so cavalierly toss into the "has no good access to Internet" human discard pile.

There are 1.3 million blind people and 9 million who are severely vision-impaired, and all you have to suggest as a replacement for plain-text Usenet NEWS is RSS technology which is not a replacement for Usenet NEWS (and frequently implemented in a way which is inaccessible to the blind), and web-based forums which are frequently designed in a way which makes them inaccessible to screen readers (and thus inaccessible to blind people).