In article , invalid wrote:
On 2014-09-02, Patty Winter wrote:

[unneeded quotage deleted]


What other Usenet archive are you aware of that the Admin could point
to for people to read the public discussion and feedback on this topic?

The primary way to reference a Usenet article has always been and remains
the Usenet Message-ID header. If you want to include additional ways such as
google that is fine but there is no guarantee google is archiving what you
want or that you can get to it.

The article wasn't referencing a single message, but rather an entire
thread, and from 5.5 years ago. I know that my ISP's newsserver doesn't
go back that far, and given how few ISPs even carry Usenet any more, I
can't imagine that there are many (if any) that do.


And nobody should _have_ to use google since
google is not at the top of the hierarchy. It is just another (bad) news
server. Sortof. It does not comply with Usenet RFCs and it should be banned
from peering for all the spam it is responsible for.

I totally agree in terms of *posting to* Usenet, but Google is the
only game in town (AFIK) for *reading* five-year-old postings, except
for possibly some scattered servers here and there that only their
users would know about.


Of course "Google is not Usenet," but it has the old Deja News Usenet
archive and it is constantly adding to that archive. Is there a better
Usenet archive available?

If you have your own news server as many do then your own archive is the
best archive. If not you can still search any news server you have access to
by Message-ID.

Of course, but how many of the people who might want to check a
five-year-old thread have their own news servers?


Numerous public and many pay servers have extensive retention.

Such as? And what about people who don't want to bother setting up
an account with one of those services just to read one old thread?


Pointing people
to google as _the_ source of Usenet articles is just wrong whether or not
they have the "best" archive. It puts people in a position of depending on
google for Usenet when there is absolutely no basis for doing so.

Unfortunately, there is every basis for doing so when the intent is to
offer a place where anyone from anywhere in the world can quickly look
up an old thread without any kind of registration or other hurdles.


Hopefully when sooner rather than later google gets out of the "groups" game
then all those pointers to google groups posts will be dead broken and
useless but all the Message-IDs will still be valid and useful.

I would be perfectly happy if people could not post from Google, but
I don't see why you would wish for their Usenet archive to become
inaccessible. You seem to be wanting to throw the baby out with the
bathwater.


Patty