RIP Google Groups Dejanews.com Archive?

[jvolkman]

Seems like the content is still there? Here's me getting smacked down as a kid for asking for warez: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.doom/c/RrzQBjHIa6k/m/Q...

[kstrauser]

You should have replied that their sig was unnecessarily huge and was clogging the servers more than you did.

Most of what I know about online knife-fight arguing came from Usenet.

[sandyarmstrong]

You are a brave soul. I can't bring myself to share my pathetic early teenage exploits on Usenet. Hexen was awesome though. :-)

[qingcharles]

Here's me arguing with Jez San (Star Fox) about polygons in 1994. He eventually offered me an interview:

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.programmer/c/j0CqgQSoV...

[dale_glass]

Ah, the good old days when ~20MB was huge. Doom 2016 was ~60GB, and that was 7 years ago.

[shortformblog]

This is my new favorite comment. Surfacing something this cringe is truly magical.

[godber]

Haha, thanks for sharing!

[nurple]

I have to ask: were you using your dad's Usenet account?

[skrebbel]

Did someone send you Hexen though

[oofoe]

Was there not a huge archeological effort by people all over the place to resurrect old backups and older servers so that the news archive could be complete? Lovingly retrieved, curated and donated because DejaNews was going to be "forever".

I realize that breathless reviews of "Small Wonder" and 40 line Boba Fett .sigs may not be the wisdom of the ages, but it's still an important part of the history of the Internet.

[dn3500]

Yes, the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive. It was on IA for a while but has been forced underground for legal reasons. You can still find copies pretty easily.

https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive

[layer8]

I’m a bit confused. According to the Wayback Machine, dejanews.com already redirected to groups.google.com for many years, similar to how www.dejanews.com still does. So they just dropped the redirect from the plain domain without “www.”?

[grepfru_it]

The domain apex has always been a problem for hosting companies. Since the apex domain is usually overloaded (TXT SPF MX records etc) it’s very easy for the A record to be modified or lost unintentionally. It’s almost a breath of fresh air to see such an old solved problem (you do run a cmdb right?) appear again even if temporarily

[reidrac]

Only mildly related but I'm using Eternal September to follow a handful of newsgroups and the spam I see in those come from Gmail accounts via Google Groups.

I wonder of it would be better if Google was out of Usenet completely instead of not completely caring.

[shever73]

I use Eternal September too. I wish that there was another archive of Usenet. Google’s “stewardship” of it has been predictably disastrous.

[floren]

I've configured my news server to just drop everything that originated from Google Groups.

It's been a big improvement.

[willtemperley]

Marl the Marginal User strikes again.

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

[WalterBright]

NNTP still survives. The D language forums are based on NNTP. It's nice to have forums that are text only (no emojis), no signatures, no ads, no fat borders, etc. I also wrote an archiver for it that creates static web pages out of the threads.

[wolverine876]

Also nice for lightning responsiveness and threaded conversations. It's as if News has everything I want in a forum and nothing else.

[layer8]

How does text-only imply no emojis?

[jl6]

Did something get announced? The search interface at groups.google.com still seems to work.

(Well, it works as well as its modern incarnation ever did. It’s been some time since there was a way to cleanly browse a newsgroup using Google Groups).

[alberth]

It’s been this way for 20+ years.

> Google Groups became operational in February 2001, following Google's acquisition of Deja's Usenet archive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups

[dragontamer]

> The requested URL / was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

This is the part people are talking about.

This all could just be a weekend glitch that's fixed on Monday or Tuesday this week. I wouldn't leap to the conclusion of this title without an announcement from Google.

[altdataseller]

I remember the good ole days when I discovered I could actually talk with like minded fans about anime in alt.fan.dragonball (AFD).

monkeigh, tazer, Naa, MiraiMatt, JimboChiu, MattBlue. I still remember all their screen names

[OfSanguineFire]

What I miss from those early days is the complete lack of profiles. People really were just screen names, there were no user profiles. Often one didn’t learn more about one’s fellows unless one arranged to meet up in real life (which was a thing back then). When people could not insist on a particular demographic identity or political wing, no one was looking for personal validation and discussion remained limited to the subject of the fora. Consequently, ideological battle was limited, and while flame wars were common, they usually involved nerd minutiae instead of society-wide polemics.

Compare this to later social media, where it has been taken to extremes: I’ve seen Mastodon users whose profiles are a long list of their gender identity, sexual preference, furriness, autism or mental afflictions (officially diagnosed or self-diagnosed), favored political party, and COVID masking status, and in discussion of any topic we are supposed to consider all this.

[wolfendin]

I was just thinking about Jim a few weeks ago, for the obvious reason.

[fifticon]

and google continues their efforts to convince me to never rely on one of their products :-/

[squarefoot]

Regarding Usenet, I was convinced to never trust Google anymore the day they removed the discussion search filter from the search engine, which happened roughly 10 years ago. Before that date one could search for people discussing products or services, while after that day one would be inundated by a pile of pages selling those products or services. They first removed the filter from the main page, but kept it reachable through the search URL, then completely removed the functionality, although people were already complaining. It wouldn't cost them a dime to keep it; that was a deliberate move to direct users searches from community forums to commercial pages.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-1799...

[atomicfiredoll]

In the last year or so they sold Domains from underneath without warning. They also apparently changed the settings on two older Gmail accounts to make them inaccessible.

I kept those accounts around because they had a maiden name and other services tied to them, I know for a fact at least one of them has an alternative contact email. There's no information on recovery and no way to contact anybody.

Maybe it's just timing, but, it feels like in the last year or so, things have especially been going downhill with them and there have been more Google related fires to fight.

As a result, I've moved my team off Workspaces and I'm winding down that Google org. And no, Google, I'm not signing up for YouTube Premium. I previously thought things were decoupled decently from Google and enough fallbacks were in place, but now I see the company as a clear risk and am doing everything I can to avoid it.

[rjgonza]

How come, is dejanews.com being gone due to some failure of/at Google groups?

[jsnell]

Were you actually affected by this somehow?

Because, you know, this page had been nothing but a redirect to Google Groups for 22 years. That seems plenty of time for people to update their bookmarks.

If you weren't affected, this doesn't really sound like an argument made in good faith.

[bobsmooth]

I can't imagine being a historian in 100 trying to piece together history from a largely forgotten internet. Whole forums that shaped me as a person have been lost to time. Archive.org helps, and there are individuals with site rips on aging hard drives, but I'd bet more information has been lost in the past 10 years than all of human history has created before it.

[mcherm]

Every single conversation before 1859 between any 2 individuals who were not literate has been lost.

While I decry the unnecessary loss of this record (which Google maliciously chose not to offer to archivists, knowing full well that archivists would choose to preserve them if given the opportunity), we are actually living in the BEST recorded era of history, because only now have certain kinds of preservation become possible.

[hotnfresh]

Imagine trying to figure out whether the 2047-earliest-reliably-attested-timestamp-date gigabytes-of-text-large newsgroup backup you have is genuine, or has been subtly AI-altered to change history to be more favorable to [some group]

[mynameishere]

trying to piece together history from a largely forgotten internet

"Eureka! Here's what some nerd thought about Star Trek!"

[qingcharles]

The entirety of the largest social network of its time was lost when the single last MySpace hard drive was erased o_O

[brudgers]

Cultural vandalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups

[thom]

This gave me a sudden panic, but no - it's all still there in Google Groups, enough teenage angst and purple prose to roll my eyes back in my head with such force that I temporarily tumbled back in time. I don't know if Usenet or IRC were really significant, compared to the social media of today. Certainly there were more nooks and crannies in which to hide, more corners you could call your own. But that's also what growing up feels like. That park bench where maybe you had your first kiss and it was once the entire universe, that's really just a place for people to sit, it means nothing. That small place you loved can't exist anymore because you're bigger, you see a broader horizon, you admit others. You can never fit yourself back down into that little, sheltered place, and you blame the places you inhabit now for being too open and noisy. Growing up is being messy, incoherent, disappointed. There's no medium that can take you back to the clarity of youth.

[thevagrant]

Is there any alternative archive?

[layer8]

https://www.usenetarchives.com/

[raxi]

It is down for many years already and no one spotted.

[m0d0nne11]

USENET did, obviously, have a lot of garbage but it was manageable, contained boggling amounts of valuable info and nobody (yet) "owned" it. Now, with The Great Enshittification of the Internet nearly complete, USENET's loss is just that much more painful because it could have been prevented.

[gandalfian]

The terrible irony is now nobody reads Usenet because of the spam. But people continue to endlessly automatically spam because Usenet is picked up by web indexers like Google who read the spam links. So Google dejanews has killed the very thing it valued. The machines have taken over and pushed out the humans.

[zeruch]

I still recall trying to recruit one of the dejanews SREs to come work at my then employer (VA Linux) to now avail. A couple of months later he was a Googler.