Today I caught word of an old steadfast friend’s demise. Well, an old friend metaphorically speaking, not a person I actually know. No, not that guy; the Sonic.net Usenet server. My boss fired of a note today announcing that news.sonic.net, long quietly understood to be terminally ill and in need of a number of costly, intricate, and risky transplants and upgrades, is being shifted over to palliative care. The deluge of warez and donkey porn and flamewars and spam have just been too much to justify as a value-added no-charge service. Dane explains:

Our Usenet infrastructure is dying. Due to this, I would like to encourage you join our new web-based discussion forums at http://forums.sonic.net/

Five years ago we spent a huge amount to build a massive cluster. Since then Usenet volume has grown at least four-fold. The systems are old, drives are failing, and the infrastructure cannot keep up with the total volume. As a result, we’re missing some percentage of headers, so while downloading of messages by message ID (for example by using an NZB index) generally works, relying on our headers results in many “missing posts”.

As less than 1% of our customers use the Usenet, we have no plans to reinvest in Usenet at this stage, and it’s only a matter of time before these old systems reach such a state that they can no longer be patched up. At that time, we plan to stop proving NNTP to customers, and will encourage folks to subscribe to one of the many services such as Giganews, EasyNews, Astraweb, etc.

The local discussions in the sonic.* groups have been a great opportunity for customers to interact with each other and with Sonic.net staff. Today there is a very similar growing community in the forums, so please check them out!

Sincerely,

Dane Jasper

I’ve long thought of Usenet as the last vestige of the old untamed frontier that the Internet used to represent. It is very informally organized, with each server administrator bearing sovereign authority for peering configuration, message retention, and propagation policies. Once something gets out on Usenet, there’s no telling how far it will reach, and no way of taking it back once it’s out. I’m not quite nostalgic enough to pay money out-of-pocket for access, but it will be sad to see this window to inter-networked anarchy finally put down.