[HECnet] Re: Usenet

Thanks for the offer of a feed at some point. I'm nowhere near ready here though. The spam is distressing - I had an automated arrangement for marking it all as spam (and then hate speech in the case of 'voodoo spells to kill your enemies') using the google groups UI. Early on, the threads so marked were deleted. Now it looks like items so marked are actually reinstated by Google shortly afterwards!!

The whole thing reminded me of additional anecdotes during my postgraduate days. By some accident of actually being interested in usenet, the computer science department where I researched/worked, negotiated a feed from ukc long before the computer services department (the central university computing facility) knew usenet was a thing. So we as computer science fed the rest of the university via the service department and acted as a gateway for outbound usenet traffic. In an attempt to do something sensible with retention times and whether or not to retain groups at all, we logged some readership/authorship statistics. There were some surprises coming out of the statistics: a group called soc.culture.lebanon seemed very active and those reading and posting to that group from the university were accounts whose user-IDs didn't correspond to the names they were using. We eventually discovered that there was some sort of roaring trade in computer services accounts for researchers and postgraduates that were being passed on when a researcher left and used for the rather long period of time before they were disabled and deleted. Prior to discovering this however, some of us looked into soc.culture.lebanon to discover a hotbed of flame-wars, personal attacks and such, a large number of which seemed to be caused or fanned by one of these 'surplus' accounts. I'm not sure whether I'm ashamed or what to say that I facilitated the injection of a fake message, constructed in the style of the central protagonist, into the department's spooling area... and out it went. The responses provoked across the planet were varied to say the least - my tears of laughter at some point were quite genuine. Meanwhile, the computer services department investigated their somewhat lax account cleanup procedures and those making use of the facility. We all then moved on to what we were supposed to be doing. This was all back in the late 80s by the way.