[gopher] History and future of "the gopher project"

[Nuno Silva]

On 2015-01-11 13:06, Kim Holviala wrote:
> > On 11 Jan 2015, at 12:21, Mateusz Viste <mateusz at viste.fr> wrote:
> > 
> > On 01/10/2015 09:16 PM, Jeff W wrote:
> >> Before doing so he moved the gopher project email list over to the Debian
> >> project's mailman-based listserv, hence the current arrangement.
> > 
> > About this - why are we all using this mailing list in the first place? There have been a dedicated nntp group for gopher since forever: comp.infosystems.gopher but surprisingly, this mailing list is much more active.
> 
> Yes, NNTP is a much better protocol… but getting a feed nowadays is pretty complicated unless you pay for some NNTP service. Pretty much all ISPs have stopped providing that, and free servers went away because of spamming.
> 
> I might be mistaken, of course.

I think there is still eternal-september (old motzarella), that filters
binary content and at least used to filter posts from google groups.

Datemas used to be free, but I think that changed for new users. My ISP
has a USENET NNTP server, that actually appears to be fast, but I think
that this is a quite big exception to the rule.

USENET (not NNTP) has had problems with spam and the like, but most of
it can be handled with a killfile.

Even then, I think that the current arrangement is quite good: we have a
mailing list which is also available through NNTP, so people who prefer
NNTP can use that gateway.

-- 
Nuno Silva
Helsinki, Finland