[coroxout]

"The most productive and efficient mean for discussions is now pretty much just a binary deposit for porn and copyrighted material."

Agreed, and definitely sad.

Last time I looked, even the binaries groups seemed to be mainly full of bots posting identical executable binaries (presumably malware) under thousands of different names per group, per day.

Although most text groups are now so dead that even the spammers have left. Maybe it could be reclaimed, if anyone could be bothered?

[mhd]

Once people get in there again, spamming will resume. Never mind that a lot of them are mostly in there for spamming the Google archive, not aiming at Usenet itself. Might even get them a better pagerank… I think you're actually seeing more spam in Google Groups archives than when you're getting it from real NNTP servers, as they should respond to canceling messages (and collaborate spam filtering should be pretty effective).

But few people are interested in making Usenet a better space to live in. Follow the money and look at how many sites are essentially proprietary discussion groups.