Re: Is newsgroup "linux.debian.user" broke ...

[miquels@cistron.nl (Miquel van Smoorenburg)]

In article >Pine.SOL.4.04.10008011304390.29002-100000@unix01>,
Christopher Mosley  <cmosley@voicenet.com> wrote:
>Is the newsgroup "linux.debian.user" broke everywhere or just here?

The linux.* hierarchy has been shut down a couple of years ago. But
ofcourse once those groups exist it's hard to remove them on
all news servers. "Old newsgroups never die and they don't fade
away, either" or something like that goes the old Usenet saying.

Usually, those groups are empty, until someone starts another
mail2news gateway again. That has happened a number of times.
A lot of them have been shutdown again fairly quickly as well
since the linux.* hierarchy was shut down for good reasons: spam
and clueless users.

When the linux-kernel mailing list was also a newsgroup, a lot
of the messages were spam, and when you mailed to it you would
post in usenet as well and your address got spam-harvested. Now
a lot of people didn't like that. Also, AOL users that failed to
install their latest RedHat CD went to the linux-kernel newsgroup
list and demanded help. So that list became unreadable. Real
kernel hackers backed away from it and even started to use
private, secret mailing lists. That ofcourse was B A D.

So in the end, the whole linux.* hierarchy was shutdown. The gateway
at yggdrasil, and the servers that carried the group (Cistron used
to be the European hub for linux.*).

>The newserver here never has any posts but deja news picks up the posts?

I think that deja internally gateways some lists to their news
system, I doubt that linux.debian.user actually still exists,
but you never know if someone started gatewaying again, perhaps
even by accident.

>I'd much prefer a newsgroup than a mailing list.

Run your own newsserver and do the gatewaying yourself, being *very*
careful that you do NOT send the group(s) back out again.

Mike.
-- 
Cistron Certified Internetwork Expert #1. Think free speech; drink free beer.