Re: 1st RfD: Mass-deletion of moderated groups without a moderator

On Wed, 8 Jan 2025 10:28:30 -0600, Steve Bonine <spb@pobox.com> wrote:

Path: news..!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Steve Bonine <spb@pobox.com>
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: 1st RfD: Mass-deletion of moderated groups without a moderator
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2025 10:28:30 -0600
Message-ID: <vlm93g$2s1vg$1@dont-email.me>
References: <vla2t6$5g57$1@dont-email.me>
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; ..="abuse@eternal-september.org";
...
Big-8 Management Board wrote:

 ������������� REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
This is a formal Request for Discussion (RFD) to remove the following
101 moderated newsgroups.

>
When these groups are removed, the history associated with the contents
of the group will disappear.  I do not know how much this matters. There
are cases where someone doing research could use the information, but it
is rare.  But when it's gone, it's gone.
If I thought that the removal of 101 groups would make a difference in
anything that matters, I would be more supportive.  But this is a drop
in the bucket in terms of the number of inactive groups.  The effect of
this change would be to slightly reduce the chance of someone posting
into a newsgroup that they found by doing a name search and their action
being a waste of time because there is no moderator or no users of the
group.
The bottom line for me is that it's not worth investing the effort at
this point in the life of Usenet.  But it's not my time . . .

fwiw, googlegroups is still available (san raw message headers) for those
searching for remnants, and the blueworld server appears to have complete
retention going back about 21 years (csiph 9, paganini 5, netfront 4) etc.

about 10% of currently active newsgroups are moderated, but the remaining
90% unmoderated active newsgroups have been continually flooded by trolls
(and what's left on server spools after the global googlespam inundation),
so anyone doing serious research of usenet newsgroups had better learn to
use comprehensive scoring filters to winnow down the wheat from the chaff