Newsgroups = personal trading centre?

[Onakra]

I don't know if this belongs in this Misc or in the other, but what do you all think of the increasing use of the newsgroups as a personal trading centre?

Instead of FTP, DCC, ICQ as better methods for doing this I see more and more "ATTN: xxx - Here is your ep foo n - Please post n-2" posts. Figure 17 seems a much wanted repost series (ABA, ABMA and ABMAR) at the moment...

Is there anyone else who feels like this or am I seeing things again?


Onakra

[user]

I don't really like it either, and wish that people would at least post such trades only in ABMAR, if they feel the need to do so at all. Plus whatever happened to waiting at least 6 months or so after a series was posted before even thinking about reposting it?

[Tobias Rieper]

Well, don't forget that for every active poster, there are at least 100 inactive leechers, which don't even post requests to the group.

Until last spring, I was one of them. I started leeching here early 2000. Back then I wanted NGE. But it was posted that much before, the regulars ignored it. So I didn't made a request, but waited in the dark... And tell you what, after 6 months I got all EPs - just from those occassional tradings...

They are not wanted in aba or abma... but hey, that's why we revived abmar. As long as it happens there, I don't mind the tradings. There are more people downloading them, than you think.


Same with the reposts - annoying in the main groups, but in abmar was made for them...

T.Rieper

[Keikai]

A regular recently mentioned similar sentiments recently when suggesting some FAQ updates. I personally have mixed feelings. Like most things its okay until it gets out of hand. Recently, I feel it has gotten a bit out of hand.

I do think ABMAR would be a far superior place for such activities when direct connection methods are unavailable. I too think that trading in the group is not a horrible thing since when you are newer it all seems like new material.

Perhaps in-group or direct suggestions to the "offenders" to move the more long-running trading sequences to direct connection methods or ABMAR should be the first course of action. We can see how things go from there. I am planning on rewording the "trading" section in the FAQ a bit so once I have done that folks will be able to point there. But it will still be more along the lines of a preferred behavior than a rule.

[Jiss]

It is a bit wasteful as it should be in ABMAR, but some people do not follow that group (as it can get quite big for headers), but there are plenty of other ways/places for it. Much as Keikai will kill me for this this might be something to stress some more in the FAQ (think we only have a minor mention).

A learning process of sending a reply to the first header saying something polite, like 'please keep this to ABMAR/outside of AB(M)A' might be useful as I doubt some posters have even bothered to read the FAQ, while others don't care.

That being said, in the old days I appreciated these odd posts for picking up missed episodes, but since now ABMAR exists I see no reason for them to be posted here (in the relative sense) anymore. Plus it gets in the way for those of us who do have the previous post (and with 20,000 posts still to download I really don't want to sort through them to pick out the reposts).

Yay! Had'ta post else Tobias would be one up on me again

[Gorunova]

I've noticed it too. There seems to have been a slight increase lately, but not enough to call it more than a blip.

I don't think it's a problem as the files being traded are on-topic and the volume doesn't become ridiculous. But if the files aren't of general interest I really think the trading should be taken to other protocols.

When I want to trade large files with my friends and there's no appropriate LAN party to do it at, I give them an account on my home file server and let the SCP the smack.

[oblio]

I don't know how much you can regulate it on groups as big as the AB*A groups. (And I don't know too many people with scp ^_^.)

Anyway, without multiple people making a concerted effort, I doubt it will stop. Maybe subtle suggestions of moving such behavior to abmar would have the desired effect... I don't know.

[Neuralblastoma]

I'm the regular that Keikai mentioned requesting several FAQ updates which included personal trading.

I won't mention any names but some users very recently were definitely using ABA/ABMA as there own personal trading centre. Usenet is not a personal trading centre.

There is no reason that these people cannot use email to communicate thier requests to each other and use ICQ, IRC or FTP's to make the trades.

[Tobias Rieper]

I stated my opinion here already, but now I have a nice example:

To fill the time waiting for Seikai no Senki EP 13 (damn cliffhangers...), I started watching Crest of the Stars (which I haven't seen yet). But a quick storage audit reveals, that I'm missing EPs 11-13.

Damn, I thought I was complete on this one. Maybe the disc got lost in the mess, I call my home...

I was already on my way to the request board, when a little thought hit my brain: "Crest of the Stars? Hey wait, I think I read this in the group recently..."

Looking in my readers was pointless, because I'm deleting posts, which don't interest me. So I went to the web interface of Easynews and did a quick serach.
And yes, luky me, EPs 8, 11, 12 and 13 were traded in abmar 2 weeks ago. I'm downloading 11-13 through the zip manager while I type this...

So my butt was saved again, thanks to some tradings of other people.
(And thanks to the friggin 5 week retention of Easynews...)



T.Rieper

[Onakra]

So if you hadn't seen it, or if they where reposted as seikai no monshou (and you didn't know that name) they would have been reposted again, just 2 weeks after the other one. Because once requested I'm sure someone would have reposted them again.

I'm beginning to see why there was such resistance in alt.config when ABMAR was proposed. The volume of ABMAR has increased enormously in the past few weeks and series being reposted just weeks after a 'full run' seem to increase as well. Like I wrote in another thread here somewhere, where are the days when a full repost was done months after?

I know I probably have a 'bad rep' already for continously writing things like this, so this won't do much damage. But by having ABMAR aren't there more reposts quickly instead of at a later time? Wasn't this one of the reasons to create ABMAR? I think if ABMAR didn't exist at this time there wouldn't be so much reposts going on...

Ok, I don't expect much flames seeing the memberlist , but at least a few responses to this.


Onakra

[Tobias Rieper]

[xo]

Re: the individual trading aspect
I have no issues with single episode trades in abmar. Setting up FTP, coordinating IRC time, etc can be difficult and as long as abmar exists and, Tobias mentioned, there is the potential for others to benefit I think it's an appropriate use. aba and abma get into different territory though.

I have an exactly analogous example to his as well: in the midst of watching Cowboy Bebop, I discovered one ep I had was in raw Japanese. Thanks to animeusenet, Easynews, and a lot of luck, I was able to download it and continue watching within the hour.

Re: near term full reposts
In the age of PAR (all hail!), I question this as well. It seems like a lot of posters are in the traditional frame of mind of doing the full reposts to avoid the hassle of juggling individual fill requests. Habit more than anything? I mean if there there was a significant demand for it, that's one thing, but to do so without that demand and out of habit maybe a methodology worth trying to phase out.

[Melchior]

Getting into this topic a little on the late side...

I've been absolutely amazed by the sheer volume of traffic in ABMAR recently. In fact, earlier today I unsubscribed my newsreaders from ABMAR because it's fairly rare that I download any files from that group, and it's getting to be a pain to select and delete all the messages/files that I don't really want to download.

Given that we have PAR files at our disposal, I'm surprised that some series are getting a full repost, time-shifted a week later on ABMAR-- to me, it seems like it really shouldn't be necessary, except for people on truly shitty newsservers who don't subscribe to a premium service.

...And then there's the issue of wasting storage space on newsservers-- a single-episode trade between two people, assuming that very few other people would download it, would take up space on *everybody's* newsservers, despite very few people downloading it... To me, that's a waste. Such trades would be much more efficient on IRC/ICQ/Hotline/Some-other-P2P-program. I mean, the beauty of Usenet is that it's an amazingly efficient use of bandwidth-- Usenet servers are basically along the same lines as the local caching servers that Akamai Technologies was trying to make work (anybody know if they're still around), or some ISP's local caching servers-- the server downloads a file from elsewhere on the internet once, and only once. Then, dozens/hundreds/thousands of your ISP's customers download that material-- it substantially reduces the need for your ISP to have a ReallyFat pipe to the rest of the internet, thus decreasing costs there. ...And single-episode trades reduce the efficiency of the system, by using every ISP's bandwidth to help only a handful of people...

...Premium newsservers: when it comes down to it, an account with a premium newsserver is pretty inexpensive-- Easynews is $10 a month, gives 6GB, and has (as of the last time I checked their web interface) 48 days of retention. That's more than a month and a half of posts, and 6GB is plenty for use as a fills-server. I'm pretty confident that most (not all-- one of my good friends is an exception) of the people who refuse to sign up for a premium service are the people who won't ever pony up the cash to buy anime on DVD, and are thus leeches in every sense of the word... In the case of my good friend, he buys DVDs whenever he can afford them, but (in part since I live 10 minutes away) hasn't yet realized the usefulness of a premium newsserver (he's still relatively new to Usenet). Oh well-- eventually he'll find something that he wants to download that our ISP's server has crapped out for, and a show that I'm not downloading, on a day when I'm nearing my limit on Easynews... Ummm, what was the original topic of discussion? I've lost track...

[oblio]

Another episode of "oblio won't shut up"....

Besides my previous anxiety about policing in general, here are my thoughts...

1. It is NO surprise that abmar has turned into the dumping ground that it has. First of all, you get some people who consider fills (me) posting those there. Secondly, you get people doing properly handled reposts there (query for interest, strong interest showed, posts <200MB/day). So this thing is already getting its share of traffic. Add to that the "trading", people excessively posting. People (me) using it as a dumping ground for v2 episodes that I am required to post but don't target a large interest base and the thing is out of control. Of course, there is no single reason why, and some of the postings are more legitimate than others.

In my opinion, the biggest problem is usenet as trading medium rather than distribution medium.

2. At least since ABMAR is its own group administrators can seperately control it in terms of retention. Frankly, if I ran a news server, I would force the thing to 1 or 2 days retention and walk away. Its a repost group after all. I don't know what policies are for real admins though.
This isn't that relevant, but I felt it was worth pointing out.

Again, though, I'm not sure how to stop it. From my point of view, a lot of the newer people seem like they are going to post something, community be damned. Sometimes I think they want the m4d pr0pz, othertimes perhaps they are just less cognizant of the repercussions of shared resources and are really doing their best to be a part of the bigger whole.

But I'm starting to bore myself, so I'll stop. :) Thats all really. Both trading and abmar volume are problems, but I don't know how to fix them.

[xo]