In article >[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Christopher Mosley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
