The volunteers who archive newsgroups do so in a variety of formats. Indexes, compression schemes, and so on vary in sophistication.
Remarks.
Section 2. of the main comp.compression FAQ explains the compression schemes commonly encountered. Most used are the Gnu Project zip (gzip) and compress.
Credit goes to
Some newsgroup archives distinguish themselves by ...
...XXXX, YYY, Benjamin Franz The moderated-groups mailing list [give ref] comprises a wealth of
experience on archive maintenance.
One bit of counsel: read the
basic
IR literature.
Steve Murray More recently, I've learned of "Internet on a Cd-Rom", from
Logica Servizi Edizioni Software s.r.l. Again, I have not seen
this for myself, but promotional literature promises tens of
thousands of quality articles per CD, for under $75 US each.
Contact Logica as ndr@logica.it or log-info@logica.it, or telephone
39-6-44291214, or FAX 39-6-44291390.
The problem here is with growth of the net. News administrators seem to be
unwilling or unable to cope with the increased traffic that results from
publication of their site in my list. They cannot be blamed for this; the
rapid growth in usage seems to be straining many resources on the net.
There are in fact a number of NNTP servers that can be accessed freely.
However, publishing the address of an accessible site seems to result in
such a load increase that public access is shut off. So giving out the
addresses of the sites that I know of will certainly be self-defeating!
Gopher news servers are easily found throught the use of Veronica. Search
through gopher directories using the keyword "Usenet" or "news." Not every
site that turns up this way is accessible, but a percentage of them can be
used.
The list of public NNTP servers was an experiment. I have learned a good
deal about how the net works from maintaining the list. Unfortunately, one
of the results of the experiment was proof that the list is impractical
under present conditions. It is for that reason that I am no longer
maintaining the list.
Arnold Lesikar
lesikar@tigger.stcloud.msus.edu
Thanks to
NeoSoft,
a commercial provider of, among other services, Internet
connectivity. They have made this space available at reduced charge.
In late 1995, there have been around three to four hundred accesses
each day of the *newsgroup_archives web.
What to do if you can't find an archive
Feel free to email me;
it occasionally happens that, with the motivation of a specific
need, I can turn up an archive that hasn't yet made its way into
this index. Before resorting to that, though, there are a few
other resources which archive-seekers ought to know:
NetNews databases and indexes
Altavista
Altavista and
DejaNews are the two archives I use most often.
DejaNews
DejaNews is
simply great. For all the attention Yahoo receives, fulfilling
a different need, I find DejaNews a far more impressive technical
feat. If you think you read something in some newsgroup within
the last two months, and you can remember a few keywords from the
article, or the author's name, or the newsgroup, or perhaps some
other shred of information, you're likely to find exactly what
you need with DejaNews in quick order.
Excite
Excite implements interesting
new indexing technology, which it applies both to Web and newsgroup
documents. I have yet to succeed in convincing it to deliver me
any of the latter, though; it definitely searches and locates
relevant postings, but my experience is that something is wrong with
delivery.
InfoSeek
InfoSeek indexes
something like the most recent month of over 10,000 NetNews
newsgroups. InfoSeek charges a fee, but permits limited
demonstration searches at no charge. I'm still experimenting
with InfoSeek; it looks quite promising.
InfoSeek
InReference
Internet Archive
I haven't researched this site at all. I do know that founder
Brewster Kahle is a thoughtful pro, and I look forward to studying
his work here.
NPAC Oracle 7
Gang Cheng of the
Northeast Parallel Architectures
Center began in 1995 experimental (?)
archives of a number of
newsgroups (and mailing lists). The user interface has
yet to communicate to me all that I believe is intended, but I
do know how to reach the Hypermail view there of several dozen
newsgroups. I've included them in their proper places in this
index. Perhaps others can locate even more information at this
site; I know it's not all getting through to me.
Usenet Newstand
Critical Mass Communications'
Usenet Newstand
most closely resembles DejaNews, from what I can tell. It indexes
a far, far more restricted universe of newsgroups, but seems to
afford more precision in its searches. I'm still researching this
one.
The CD-ROM answer
For the first six months of the life of this document, I included
excerpts from the promotional literature of
CD Publishing Corporation
and
InfoMagic.
I've since decided that hypertext references to their WWW
pages suffice. I have no relation to either organization, not even
that of customer. Both offer newsgroups-on-CD-ROM. See them for
more details. Also,
PCM-Productions
publishes CD-ROMs of several alt.binaries*
and Visual Basic-related newsgroups.
Public newsreading sites with long expirations
Perhaps you're searching for a particular article posted recently to
NetNews, but long enough ago that it has already expired from your home
system. Is there someplace else you might read it? Perhaps so. Here
are some possibilities:
I quote:
PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE NEWS SERVERS
I have taken down the Lesikar list of public news servers.
Why
Why I composed this Index
Like many of the things I've done--and most of my best work, in
particular--I created this index on a day when it seemed less
trouble than not to do it. A net_journalist pushed me recently,
and I estimated my original motivations as
My realized rewards after a year and a half have been more like
In my life as a
software
engineer, I've learned wild enthusiasm for reviews. I've also
learned that for results to match expectations even this closely
should be counted a notable success. I do; on the whole, I'm glad
I started this Index to Newsgroup Archives.
Why newbies read it
I know Ron Meisenheimer only through a few email exchanges. He's far
too thoughtful and articulate for me to imagine that he ever was a
"newbie", but he once called himself that, and explained
Before I signed on with a access provider, I read something on
netiquette and style. One tip that made an impression on me
was that you should get a feel for a newsgroup before you barge
in with something that might be inappropriate. Archival material is
perfect for getting that feel. You don't have to lurk for weeks or
even months and still be unsure that your posting won't draw a
let's-not-go-into-that-again response.
Why net anthropologists study it
Why long-t...
Mirrors
Copies of this meta-index, slightly lagged, are available also at
Acknowledgements
Thanks to
Jorn Barger,
Jamie Blustein,
Josh Hayes ,
Jennifer Hodgdon,
Jim Jewett,
Kent Landfield,
Larry London,
Ron Meisenheimer,
Gerald Oskoboiny,
Jon Reeves,
Edward Vielmetti,
and
Danny Yee,
who supplied me with various
combinations of support, inspiration and information. Also credit
David Pascoe , who methodically searched
for comp.binaries.* archives, and reported the results to me for the
benefit of all of us, and many other individuals, who each filled in
one slot in the
list
nearby. Finally, there are
about two dozen others who chipped in at various times, and whom I
intended to thank explicitly, but I mislaid the list of their
names--sorry!
Administrative details
Status
This is a work in progress.
New directions
I'm
Cameron Laird.
I'm looking for help:
History
I began a draft of this document
on 16 August 1994, and immediately pushed it into FTPspace with the dozen
archives I knew at that time. I have big plans to beef up the list as I
learn more. Suggestions, corrections, ... couldn't be more welcome.
Please note that I'm maintaining this reference with less quality assurance
than is appropriate for many other projects; in particular, I make
no guarantees about the completeness of archives (some I know to be
truncated), currency of addresses (I update them as often as I make time, but
that's not much), or even hospitality of the hosting sites (I don't *think*
any of these archives are supposed to be confidential, but I have
explicitly confirmed that in only a few cases).
Validation methods
I'm slowly automating aspects of validation of these WWW pages,
particularly in regard to
[Explain details, some day.]
First drafted in HTML on 1 August 1994 by
Cameron
Laird.
http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/news.lists/newsgroup_archives.html