Community support

[Yong Huang]

> 10 years ago, NNTP seemed to be the "place to be" to ask questions and
> get answers from the general Linux community.
> 
> I've been out of touch for several years, and have seen, for example,
> Microsoft completely drop NNTP and replace it with its own web-based
> forums.
> 
> Is NNTP still the best community-based support forum?  I don't know
> know if my ISP still supports it as they use to have a local cache of
> the majority of the groups at the time...
> 
> Marco

I used to use it a lot. But there're at least two major reasons why it slowly falls into disuse. Popular use and the convenience of web forums is one. The other is failed control of spam, "flames" (as was called back then), and all sorts of unprofessional remarks, all of which would be well controlled on a web forum with a human moderator. Google bought DejaNews many years ago so the inconvenience of using Usenet as such was eliminated (we could use http://groups.google.com). Google attempted to solve the second problem by providing a link "Report as spam" (something like that) but it was useless.

Nowadays, IT or computer related newsgroups are almost always full of spam. But non-IT groups, such as alt.home.repair, are quite active, and for some magic reason, are rarely spammed. Actually, I only go there through Google's web interface (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/alt.home.repair) so even if it's not a Usenet newsgroup behind the scenes, I can't tell.

Yong Huang