Instead of having pre-set groups for newsgroup postings, if you wish to news news posts, you input a set of keywords and your computer get's back 'groups' which are set up as posts ranked "relevan" to your query. You create a few of these and you get the equivalent of dynamic newsgroups.
-- triptych, Jun 12 2000

Newsgroup article pool http://www.jps.net/antons/instead.txt
A discussion of at least two alternatives to usenet that suggest ideas similar to this. [clynne, Jun 12 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Google Groups http://groups.google.com/
Search facility for USENET. [egnor, Jun 12 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Unison www.panic.com/unison
Best. Newsreader. Ever. [Linuxthess, Oct 04 2004]

Newzbin http://www.halfbake...dea/www.newzbin.com
NZB's. 'nuff said. [Linuxthess, Oct 04 2004]

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot, having grappled with several newsreaders and found none of them entirely satisfactory. The big problem, as I see it, as that you'd require some kind of back-end process to trawl and organise all the newsposts, taking into account things like multiple newsservers, spam posts and flames.

An idea I have for my ultimate newsreader involves having a list of conversations and mapping them in some way to bring those that you've read or responded to 'closer'.
-- MonTemplar, Sep 30 2000


Lots of people (myself included) go through a phase of wanting this (see also: clynne's link). They almost always decide it's a bad idea eventually.

Newsgroups aren't just content categorization; they define communities. People post to a particular newsgroup, not necessarily because their content is topical, but because they're part of that newsgroup community. They know, roughly, the set of people who will read and/or reply to their post.

Otherwise, you might as well just post a Web page somewhere and let the search engines pick it up. People do that, too, of course, but it's not a newsgroup; there's no conversation, there's no community.

In any case, if you want to search USENET, there are facilities available for the purpose (see my link).
-- egnor, Apr 19 2001



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