freshmeat.net newsgroups retiring soon
 by Patrick Lenz, in freshmeat - Mon, Jun 30th 2008 09:07 UTC

Way back when it was still in fashion (no religious wars please) to read your news in a newsreader, freshmeat.net was one of the few sites that distributed its articles and release announcements via the wonders of NNTP. And we still do that today (with a minor interruption when we moved datacenters).

But that was then and this is now. Nowadays people use RSS readers to keep tabs on their favorite sites and freshmeat.net readers are no different. In fact, our newsserver has so little traffic that we have collectively decided that the cost of maintenance to keep this service up is not justified by the usage it gets.

Therefore I herely officially announce the retirement of the news.freshmeat.net newsgroups effective July 15th, 2008.

Stronger offerings of RSS-based subscriptions will be made available over the course of this year.

Thank you for your continued support.

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 Comments

[»] Sad
by Jörg Plate - Aug 7th 2008 12:33:17

I used it for a long time and I loved it.
Reading the articles with Gnus is my preferred method.

Thanks.

--
"I'm working on it."

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[»] Bye bye Freshmeat too ?...
by fpp - Aug 3rd 2008 12:01:19

Well I, for one, am really sorry to hear this. I did know about the nntp feed and had been using it exclusively for the last ten years or so.

With a proper (scoring) newsreader it was child's play to identify interesting items even if the daily list was long.

After wondering for a while why my newsreader wouldn't connect anymore I came here and got the bad news. I also finally created an account (which I had been doing fine without for all that time) to see if I could filter and view my way back to what I had before.

Sadly, I can't make any sense of the undocumented jumble that is "my FM", not to mention RSS. I'm so stupid I can't understand how I could teel it "show me all updates concerning Python projects, oh and this project too, and this one, although they are not Python". Doesn't sound complicated right ? It was darn easy with the nntp feed.

And I don't want it in my mailbox either - maybe on a dynamic page I can bookmark, or a custom RSS feed. But if I can't go back to the level of convenience I had before, I'll have to give up of FM altogether, which would be a shame.

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[»] Bye bye newsgroups
by Ed Avis - Jun 30th 2008 12:51:23

Yes I remember trying to read Freshmeat via nntp... but the volume of messages was far too high and I could never catch up with the day's reading. You never really wanted to post followups in the ordinary way so a newsgroup wasn't the best format.

RSS is okay, but better would be direct access to the Freshmeat database (e.g. a daily dump in XML) so tools could pick out the news that's important to you.

--
Ed Avis

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[»] Re: Bye bye newsgroups
by Patrick Lenz - Jun 30th 2008 13:14:01

XML dumps have been available forever. See: http://freshmeat.net/backend/

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[»] freshmeat.net newsgroups: didn't even know...
by Greg Louis - Jun 30th 2008 11:53:21

As a continuing usenet user I regret that you're retiring your NNTP server. The lack of traffic might have been a question of lack of publicity; I for one only learned now that the newsgroups existed!
Thanks all the same for running them for so long........

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[»] Re: freshmeat.net newsgroups: didn't even know...
by imipak - Jun 30th 2008 19:15:30


> As a continuing usenet user I regret

> that you're retiring your NNTP server.

> The lack of traffic might have been a

> question of lack of publicity; I for one

> only learned now that the newsgroups

> existed!

> Thanks all the same for running them for

> so long........

I second this in terms of knowing about them. Mind you, I also agree with the poster who said that USENET was probably not the ideal format.

From the number of replies this article has so far, I'm not even sure if the "obvious" compromise (using a public NNTP/mailing list gateway and delivering via the normal subscriber service) would be worth it.

RSS/ATOM have the disadvantage that USENET is distributed (and therefore less vulnerable to outage and supports far greater numbers of simultaneous users) and is archived by multiple services (so histories are easy to obtain), but all protocols have a limited life expectancy, and Freshmeat can't support everything, much as they would undoubtedly like to if they had the resources.

If nobody reads Freshmeat via USENET, I'd rather the resources be put into other aspects of the service.

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[»] Re: freshmeat.net newsgroups: didn't even know...
by mrmeval - Dec 10th 2008 12:17:10

Not usenet but NNTP, there is a difference. I believe they ran a standalone NNTP server. I would like to see an XML dump of the daily listing as there are enough tools to make that work fine. RSS is still lacking the polished readers and feed manipulators you can find for NNTP.

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