UW Usenet Service Retired
The UW USENET newsgroup service was retired on September 2, 2008.
Why?
Over the last ten years, USENET news readership has been in decline here at the UW. From the mid-90's peak of thousands of users daily and widespread UW course and special interest group usage, we now see fewer than 40 regular readers and no local newsgroups. We've known of this decline for a few years but maintained the service on a minimalist basis, knowing that retirement would be coming. Faced with new expenditures to keep the hardware operable and the very small population being served, we determined that it didn't make financial sense to continue offering the service.
The USENET retirement project has been working on the phase out for about two months but the difficulty of reaching every person in the small and generally anonymous user-base was a challenge. We sent a blanket announcement to the UW Techsupport mailing list in early August. That reaches a broad technical audience but probably missed some users.
What are the options now?
The easiest alternative for typical reading volumes, as exhibited by the remaining UW news reading population, is to use one of the free news services. The best example is Google Groups, at:
http://groups.google.com/
which provides a well-designed web news reader, a newsgroup to email subscription service to receive postings by email, as well as RSS syndication of groups so that they can be read using any RSS reader. Google groups also provides access to all newsgroups that Usenet carries, almost 3TB daily, compared with the 350MB/day that the UW used to receive.
