Re: Death of USENet, filem at 11! re: Is this really the Nethack group?

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
Derek Ray wrote:

> USENET has been doomed and/or dying for a long
> while.

[...]

That an individual newsgroup's traffic level should
wax and wane within this larger ocean of postings is
of no particular importance, and in the case of
rgrn, episodes of 30 or more postings a day for
months at a time are separated by lnog fallow
periods, and that's been true for at least a decade.

WRT "fallow periods" you may want to have a look at
http://groups.google.de/group/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/about?hl=en

The drop after Feb 2008 (and, maybe, also the further drop Apr 2009)
seems significant and persistent, especially compared to the previous
posting activity history of this group.

[...]

Let the doom-sayers go elsewhere, otherwise ignore
them. This newsgroup will persist as long as nethack
attracts new players.

Let me add, WRT the posters who are wondering about posting quality,
lacking content, and missing community; _we all_ are the community.
Just criticizing without contributing will not change anything here.

Note that those posters in this thread who criticized the situation
haven't (with one exception) contributed any posting in the past two
weeks (that's not bad, but it makes any valid criticism taste foul).

[...]

As for the reasons of the above mentioned drop we can just speculate.
My feelings about that... The tone in this newsgroups got unusually
rough at times and personal attacks took precedence to information
exchange and interesting posted stories. Part of that problem is the
insisting lack of acceptance for differing opinions (the "last word"
problem). Spam flood periods have dropped participation; while that
may have influenced the non-Googlers only marginally it could have
had effects on the number of newbies who would otherwise naturally
"inherit" RGRN. The quality of postings dropped when Google opened
Usenet for a larger audience, but that repelling effect for regulars
levelled again meanwhile. And, certainly, the lack of a new version
of the game doesn't provide the substance to discuss new things and
exchange interesting stories. If that last point would be the most
significant one then we won't have to expect any traffic change in
RGRN anytime soon.

Back to the last quoted sentence from Kent... To attract new players
a new version would be supporting, but we obviously don't have to
expects anything soon. Newbies switching to a Spam-reduced Usenet
access, away from Google Groups, will gain a higher signal-to-noise
ratio and therefore maybe enjoy the signal more than currently.

Anyway; it's the responsibility of each individual what he does, and
the accumulated behaviour of the folks will effectively decide about
the future of RGRN. <end of rant>

Janis
.

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