usenet, e-mail list & g00g1e (was Re: Cyrillic spam)

In article
<30dfce76-ebe1-4e8a-9095-2806a7a64fb2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
taf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Sep 10, 8:42 am, "Diana Gale Matthiesen" <Dian...@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Good grief, Google's in on this, too?  I have always belonged to just the
GEN-MEDIEVAL mailing list at RootsWeb, so wasn't aware of all the rest.
 The
loss of the archive is a real shame.  This list should have a vast
storehouse of
valuable information.


This information too is in the archives, but an occasional review
seems to help, so . . . .

The group was first suggested as a USENET discussion group. USENET was
once the primary means by which such internet group discussions took
place. Six months before, a single generic genealogy group has been
split into a half-dozen, done geographically and ethnically. Due to
the way the medieval material crosses these lines, it did not fit well
into the existing divisions, and hence a separate group was
suggested. There was a vote, and the proposal passed, creating
soc.genealogy.medieval. Because some people were more familiar/more
comfortable with email, a companion mailing list was set up (as had
been done with the other genealogy newsgroups), hosted as a public
service by AppleSoft: GEN-MEDIEVAL@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, along with a gateway
that passed messages submitted to either across to the other.
Finally, (and more generally) because at the time, USENET messages
would expire locally in a matter of weeks and no longer be available,
a private site called DejaNews maintained an archive of all USENET
messages. Over the next several years, several minor changes occurred
- AppleSoft decided it no longer wished to host the lists and RootsWeb
offered to pick up the service and received transfer of the archive
(at about the same time they started hosting their wider range of
lists). On the other side, DejaNews, which had been just a web-based
archive of USENET added the capability of direct posting, effectively
turning what was an archive into a full-fledged web-based message
board, bridged to USENET, (in the case of soc.gem.med in turn linked
to the email GEN-MED list). Then DejaNews changed their name to
Deja.com, but then had a major computer crash that took them down
completely. About six months later, Google bought out the remnants of
Deja, reformed their archives, and announced the launching of Google
Groups, which included not only the original USENET boards as well as
any others anyone might wish to create. (It was in this period that
the early messages were lost by Deja, not immediately repaired because
of their down-time, and then permanently lost when the unrepaired
remnant was passed to Google. This would not have been a big problem
since the RootsWeb archive should have been a perfect duplicate, but
in the early days, the gateway was imperfect, at times less than 50%
of the messages crossing, and at other times the gateway has gone down
entirely, so the RootsWeb archive is missing those posts that
initiated in soc.gen.med and never made it across to GEN-MED.)

So, now we have Google Groups web board soc.genealogy.medieval gated
to USENET soc.genealogy.medieval (the original group) gated to mailing
list GEN-MEDIEVAL. RootsWeb maintains an archive of GEN-MED and Google
archives their mirror of soc.gen.med.

A diagram of sorts -- perhaps a genealogy -- might be helpful for this.

Dates too might help. The Usenet group & gated applesoft list were
established I think early in 1995 (what date?). Google didn't exist
then. Dejanews emerged within a year or two later as I recall. Did it
morph to deja.com, then die, around 1998 or later? Google groups
started when? 2000?

People have been predicting the demise of the Usenet for at least ten
years, but it has managed to coexist reasonably well with web-based
technologies, at least in this instance. But many people who have come
to this forum via google don't realize its structure at all, resulting
in some serious misconceptions about it. I don't think google groups
deliberatly obfuscates the relationship of its message boards to usenet
groups to which they are gated, but they do nothing to educate users
about it. Does google have a stock exculpatory response it sends to
complainers about content or other issues with Usenet groups gated to
its boards?

There are still a few of us here who have been reading and posting
directly to s.g.m. as a Usenet group since 1995.

Nat Taylor
a genealogist's sketchbook:
http://www.nltaylor.net/sketchbook/
.

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