OT: usenet reader software

[Monte Milanuk]

On 2014-07-19, Martin S <shieldfire at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a point to still use Usenet? Last time I checked noise overwhelm
> ed signal by a factor of something close to 542.

Martin,

Fair enough question.  Seems like a lot of usenet groups have become
spam-fests, and using it to d/l various binaries of questionable origin
seems to be the major 'driving force' for a lot of people any more - for
pure usenet.  As others point out, you can filter the spam fairly easily
with a good client program.  You don't get (as much of) that kind of
spam in forums, depending on the authentication process and the
vigilance of the forum staff/moderators.  I used to subscribe to a bunch
of different Linux and programming-related mailing lists... some of
which could run to several hundred messages per month *each*.  Yeah,
decent filters and storage can mute a lot of that, but not as
effeciently as reading the groups via news.gmane.org which provides a
mail2news gateway for a lot of mailing lists like this one.  I don't
have to receive or store all those messages anymore (most of which I
skim the subject and then mark as read).

That said, the irony that there seems to be a distinct *lack* of GUI 
usenet reader programs for Linux just kills me. Seems like its either Pan, 
or knode if you're into KDE.  Otherwise... you get to go dredge up old
CLI programs like this one (slrn).  Works pretty well (better than I
remember, actually) but still... having to exit the program and restart
it to open a different server is *very* old-school :/