How to Search Today's Usenet For Programming Information? 230
DeadlyBattleRobot writes "I've been using Usenet searches since about 1995 to get programming information, sample code, etc., mostly for those standard APIs that are never documented well enough in the official documentation. At first I used dejanews, and now Google Groups (Google bought dejanews). Over the last few years, I've noticed a steady decline in the quantity of search results on programming topics on Usenet from Google, increasing difficulty with their search UI and result pages, and today I find I'm completely unable to get a working Usenet search on their advanced group search page. I'm used to searching on 'microsoft.*' or 'comp.*,' sometimes supplemented with variations like '*microsoft*' or 'comp*.' As an example, try to find a post from the 1996-1998 time period on 'database' in either the comp.* or microsoft.* hierarchies, and if you can do it, please show your search expression. There should be thousands of results, but I'm getting the result 'Your search — database group:comp.* — did not match any documents.'"
Ask Kibo (Score:5, Insightful)
Kibo seems to know how find stuff on usenet.
Unfortunately... (Score:5, Insightful)
Usenet is more or less dead with respect to technical discussions. They have all moved to disparate Web forums, the most offensive of which put freely-given advice from volunteers behind a paywall [expertsexchange.com].
There actually are a couple of good forums for Win32 advice, such as CodeProject [codeproject.com], and Google is still the best way by far to search MSDN, by adding site:microsoft.com to your query.
But Google's handling of Usenet, including (but not limited to) their unauthorized alteration of message content by mangling email addresses, has not been healthy for the venue.
I've noticed the same thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
Usenet used to be HUGE, but now it seems to be fading away. It's like all the hard-core admins who used to maintain everything are getting tired of it all.
GoogleGroups used to be good for searching stuff like this, but that too, seems to be suffering from "data rot".
Admittedly, nearly half the "content" itself could fall under the category of "rot" even when it was new, but that's for another thread...
groups poorly maintained; link on front page 404 (Score:1, Insightful)
Here's a better suggestion (Score:1, Insightful)
Go browse alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.*, after a few minutes (give or take) you'll either be "released" from your programming stress and free to write beautiful code, or you'll be ready for a cigarette and a nap :D
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's more like mercenary exchange.
You provide answers to earn credits so you can access more answer to your own questions. The problem is that the compensation kinda sucks for the expert.
I tried it out briefly when I had some cisco specific questions and the answer was mostly there. Just out of boredom I answered a few questions and even wrote some simple scripts.
This has been really ticking me off as well (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple answer: you don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody really reads much usenet anymore, and during the decline earlier in this decade, the problem was that the poster would post but the replies would come in private email. So yes, the question might get answered, but the answer never got shared.
The reason? Spam. Usenet posts became the #1 source of email addresses to spam because anybody could easily and cheaply hook up to a usenet feed and just gobble them up. So nobody posted anymore 'cause nobody wanted their address to end up on a spam list from hell.
Eventually with little proof online that anybody was reading the questions, people just stopped posting them.
Usenet was a wonderful thing when it was needed. Today, while the idea of a central yet open (re: infinitely cloned) repository of all topics of conversation may seem nice, it'll never happen again so long as spam is a problem.
Not forums, mailing lists and IRC (Score:2, Insightful)
Pros do NOT use forums. Forums are slow & inefficient (having to visit sites individually, regularly, unless they provide decent feeds). They're also centralised, which is bad in technical circles when you know stuff can go wrong, and that people can become dictators. Generally speaking, forums tends to be haunted by younger people who grew up thinking the web was the net, and started by people who care more about building a name for their site and advertising revenue than building a functioning discussion community. Also, the moderation on forums tends to either be limited, or heavy-handed.
The rest of us use mailing lists which feed directly into our mail clients (read: not webmail), and let us search/reply/archive at will. That works out very similar to usenet, is more practical now with decent mailing list software, and so it's an obvious transition. We also like IRC which allows real-time, moderated conversation, combined with online logs of those conversations.
This is par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think about it, most google apps have a few really cool and flashy features (which is why I like to use them), but then tend to have lots of UI bugs. Also, it's pretty much impossible to actually report bugs to google. At best you'll find some google group on the product that no engineer ever looks at.
Aside from the one mentioned google groops had lots of basic bugs. Until recently reading comp.lang.c++.moderated on google groups caused all sorts of problems because they weren't properly handling the escape of the ++ characters in the url (every time I clicked on a link I'd have to edit the url manually to get it to work). It took them years to find out about that and fix it. Although it was a daily annoyance to me, I had no way to get it into any kind of bug tracking system.
Even worse I've *never* been able to use google gears or google docs without major bugs and error messages, no matter what browser I used (including chrome).
Gmail, google reader, and basic search are probably the only google web apps I've seen that don't have lots of bugs. I actually have a higher opinion of their desktop apps.
Reader, which is awesome and you should check out btw, used to be very bug ridden, but it's massively improved over the last year and a half.
Search actually is kind of problematic in that the basic search works fine, but lots of the extensions are broken. Last time I tried subscribed links was broken. As in, it didn't work *at all* and there was no workaround.
I think honestly that while they obviously have high quality engineers, they just have sucky QA. I think that they focus too much on unit tests, and have forgotten that a lot of basic bugs can only be detected by someone hammering on the interface of the production system and logging bugs.
Also, I think they've basically destroyed their ability to have beta software, by making all of their software beta. Now, user have no way of distinguishing what is truly production ready software from stuff that clearly isn't, except by trying it and getting burned.
wrong answer (Score:5, Insightful)
>The question you ask is wrong...
>since people are no longer answering questions
>on usenet.
Some communities use usenet almost exclusively (the c++ community is basically built around comp.lang.c++.moderated and comp.lang.std.c++). Furthermore, a lot of programming mailing lists are mirrored to usenet.
The problem the poster had was that google's search for usenet sucks, which I have to agree. In general, google groups has deteriorated since they started adding non-usenet groups to the service.
>Answer:
>www.stackoverflow.com [stackoverflow.com]
Stackoverflow is great, but it has nothing to do with usenet or newsgroups.
Usenet is a place for communities of people to have discussions. Basically, it is a unified distributed bulletin board system, with boards for discussions of all topics *ever*. It is also a convenient place to mirror mailing lists, so that they can be browsed in a unified manner without having to subscribe to a million different mailing lists, or go to lots of different websites.
See: gmane.org
Stackoverflow is a question answer service.... basically the same as yahoo answers except that it is focussed on answers to programming questions. Basically, it is a FAQ generation system.
More generally why USENET is dying (Score:2, Insightful)
No, what killed USENET for most technical subjects is a social one: there was no social cost for posting, thus every uneducated random wanderer posted on it. Not just spam, but also posts from real persons who only had a vague notions of what whatever subject the group was about. Literally, but putting all discussion in one heirarchy was one of its biggest faults.
So where is such discussion now? Some of it, as had been said already, is in specialized web sites; most of those are moderated. But for many subjects, it has moved to old-fashion email lists. One has to be willing to risk filling your inbox with unwanted messages to even see the list much less post to it. So, few people do. Only the folks truly dedicated to that subject take that risk...and that is good. Now the discussion is between committed insiders and the signal-to-noise ratio improved greatly.
So, if you are willing to commit to your subject, find the narrow mailing list that covers it and subscribe. (Disclaimer: not all subjects have these hard-core lists, do a Google search first.)
Re:Not forums, mailing lists and IRC (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, it seems naive to completely rule out forums as a source of information. It seems like it's much less efficient to store tons of information you will never need in your local mail client's archive in hopes that the answer to a question you may have down the road will be in that archive.
Us non-pro's who don't exclude any source of information, such as forums, often get good, quick answers to all of our questions by doing a quick Google search.
Re:Wrong question (Score:5, Insightful)
The question you ask is wrong...since people are no longer answering questions on usenet.
Oh really? Then could you explain how exactly did comp.lang.c managed to receive today, a sunday of all days, until now no less than 78 posts, all regarding subjects like call by reference, duff's device and shared pointes? Could you explain how a medium that "people are no longer answering questions on" happens to get over 700 posts a week discussing a single programming language alone?
Do you happen to work for that site you just advertised?
Re:This is par for the course (Score:2, Insightful)
They've decided to go wide instead of deep. They throw ideas on the wall and see what sticks. If something becomes popular, they then focus more resources on it. It's sort of like ants spreading out to look for food. If some ant dude finds something, then bunches of ants are sent back there as reinforcements.
Re:Wrong question (Score:2, Insightful)
comp.lang.c is the exception. Quite a few of the usenet groups that still have useful content are mirrors of mailing lists.
With the explosion of the web, a lot of people got into programming that never heard of usenet. Saying "people are no longer answering questions on usenet" is obviously false, but for a lot of "modern" programming languages, the usenet group is just a mirror of the mailing list - and a lot of people using (for instance) python have probably never heard of usenet.
I don't think that usenet is dead, but I don't think that it's necessarily the best place to turn to for an answer off the bat anymore.
Also, I doubt that the GP is employed by stack overflow. I think that site is ran by two guys, and is more of a "let's try to provide a useful service" type of thing than a "let's turn a crazy profit" type of thing.
Re:I've noticed the same thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm an old Usenet hand and I think that it's had its day. A lot of it comes down to the great unwashed being allowed on my lovely, geeky Internet.
Firstly, unless you run a moderated group, there's nothing you can do about trolls. I've seen entire, vibrant groups taken down by one or two determined individuals and the idiots that feed them.
Secondly, a lot of the smaller, niche groups are dying out because people won't obey the rules anymore. They post off topic stuff on the more popular groups rather than taking the time to hunt down the proper one.
That said, one of the things that has diluted the usefulness of the Usenet archive does come from nerds, and that the posting of junk like changelogs and sourcecode.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, of note, the comp.c++ and the moderated equivlent are still very much alive. I'm pretty sure the USENET Oracle is still alive too. The comp.sys.hp48 group is still be the best place for questions about HP RPN calculators, etc.
I will note that Google's Groups Usenet searching is at least partially broken. There are some search terms I've tried in a single group search context, where I got only one or two results, when I know for a fact that there are over 100 results for that query in the archive.
What this means is that the world's largest USENET archive does not have a properly working search feature, which is a real shame. So much of the early history and culture of the Internet is in that archive... If only Google were serious about trying to fill in the archive gaps, and keep a good search interface for it.
Which is why I'd never work for them (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure it sounds great, what could be better then being an engineer in a company full of engineers with no management? Except odds are very good your special project will be released and never, ever maintained.
I knew for a fact they'd never maintain Chrome. They'd toss out a beta and then walk away from it. Have they updated it at all?
They'll do the same thing with Android. They'll release the first version and then walk away.
They buy dejanews, a wonderful resource, and now most of the results are spam come from spammers who abuse their own "Google Groups" system!
Even friggen Analytics has had Event Tracking in private beta for over a *year*. Their documentation never mentions the fact it is beta, but if you implment Event Tracking, you'll never see a change in your reports... why? Unreleased Beta.
Google, if it expects to become a major player in the software industry, needs to grow up. It has no clue how to release quality software on time. It has no clue how to maintain said software.
They need to decide if they are an advertising company or a software company. If they want to be both... good luck with that.
I have very little faith in Google at this point. They seriously need to grow up if they want to survive in the long run. Right now, they are a bunch of kids trying to pretend they are adults.
Re:Not forums, mailing lists and IRC (Score:3, Insightful)
Gmane.org [gmane.org] provides an NNTP interface (and a web one) to many mailing lists, and also a search function.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:3, Insightful)