-=> Quoting Rick Mcbroom to Bonnie Goodwin <=-
 RM> present, is  that many systems are making fido.music accessible
 RM> to Usenet auto-posting  programs. And 97% of what comes through
        Yes, "SPAM" is probably THE single largest problem on Usenet.
I specifically put a line in my audio web page that the mailing
address for comments/questions is NOT to be used for solicitations,
but I get one or more every day anyways, all automated and most having
bogus addresses to protect THEM from getting spammed back....
 RM>  That has merit. Maillists work pretty good for some things.. and
 RM> audio might  be one of them. However, I find them less
 RM> interesting than a more structured  and (relatively) immediate
 RM> format such as an echo. 
        Well, I disagree to a certain extent.  Fido is *anything* BUT
immediate!  Fido "Lag" is legendary.  I've seen it take over a week
for a message to get through.  Since the public newsserver I use in
Europe (my local one doesn't get half the incoming messages and they
don't seem to want to fix it) is undergoing upgrades and is closed in
the meantime, I've switched to the mailing list version of
rec.audio.high-end and normally they get out an issue each day and the
delay is generally no worse than the moderated delay, which is often
also about a day.  That's still at least 3x-4x faster than Fido on a
GOOD week.  I'm sure some mailing lists only come out every few weeks,
but that's hardly a requirement.  My offline reader even splits up the
mailing list digests so that they read as regular newsgroups.
 RM>  The WorldWideWait is a joke for a home user, IMHO. I can get
 RM> only a dialup  line, and even with a 28.8, I get very poor
 RM> throughput. And the lines are  noisy, so they frequntly fall back
        It depends on what you're doing.  A simple information site
with a few pictures is reasonable even at 14.4.  I have the Amiga
version of the LYNX text browser and without graphics most sites are
fairly fast.  You can always click on something you need to see.
 RM>  The Inet over a good text-only front-end is moderately
 RM> interesting. I had  such a link for 3 years. Anonymous ftp is a
        You can run a text browser on a PPP dial-up line.  You can
even run it at the same time as a graphics browser (at least on my
computer).  Same for anonymous FTP.
 RM>  My /main/ objection to Usenet is that I've never found a door
 RM> that could  gate them into QWK, or better yet, BW, and make them
 RM> work smoothly in both  directions. I simply will not bother with
 RM> doing echomail without an OLR..  and I've tried /several/ times..
        I guess you haven't tried hard enough.  I'm using the
relatively "dead" Amiga platform and even I have an offline reader
that handles "everything."  It can download raw Usenet messages and
parse them into the reader; it can separate mailing lists into their
own message areas; it can do QWK, BW, Soup, etc. and it can do e-mail,
SMTP, POP3, etc.  It's called THOR.
        I know someone who reads newsgroups offline with a PC, so
there must be software to do so.  With Thor, I don't parse it into a
QWK packet.  There's no need since it *is* an OLR.
 * AmyBW v2.14 *
... The Light at the End of the Tunnel Could be a flame thrower
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