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Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever?

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On 11/26/2020 9:14 PM, George Neuner wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 26 Nov 2020 19:01:33 -0700, Don Y
> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:

Hi George!

Have not heard from you in a while -- was beginning to think that you
may have been coviderated!  Hopefully, that's not the case (?)

>> On 11/26/2020 4:11 PM, Wojciech Zabo?otny wrote:
>>> A few Usenet groups allowed users to post their source code as shar archive.
>>> The Google Groups website supported access to those groups, viewing the
>>> message in the original (raw) format and upacking the sources.
>>> Unfortunately, last update of Google Groups has dropped a possibility
>>> to access the original of the Usenet posts.
>>> The "formatted" (in fact corrupted) version of the message does not
>>> allow to unpack the (now damaged) shar archive.
>>
>> I don't understand what you mean by "corrupted"?  Do you have a
>> pointer to an example that I can examine (without a google login)?
>>
>> Are you sure the "corruption" can't be stripped from the post
>> with a filter (script)?
> 
> The junk is HTML formatting.  The worry is that things like C++ source
> legitimately may contain angle bracket delimited text.  You'd need a
> smart filter that understands HTML tags.

Or, scrape the posts manually?  E.g., highlight text in browser,
copy, paste?

If posted as an "image" of text (to deliberately hinder capture),
a screen capture program feeding an OCR... and manual touch-up.

Though, having seen Wojciech's example, it appears that there is
more involved than just eliding HTML tags!  I've not actively studied
the (apparent) transformation to try to codify the rules that may
have been applied...

> And there may be a *lot* of it. I've seen usenet messages sent (or
> forwarded) from Google Groups with ... not kidding! ... ~10,000 lines
> of deeply nested HTML surrounding ~10 lines of text.
> 
>>> Does it mean that all sources that were posted to Usenet are now
>>> lost for us forever?
>>> Is there any other way to access the old Usenet messages in their original
>>> form?
> 
> Since Google has removed the option to see the raw message, the only
> way to get things unmangled is from some other source.

For a small-ish post, I'd wager you could scrape (as above) and
manually edit the resulting text to something that's faithful to
the original intent.  Tedious and potentially error prone but
denies "lost forever".

> Unfortunately few NNTP servers go back further than about 10 years,
> and ftp.uu.net (the original usenet archive) is no longer operating.
> 
> You can try
>    https://usenetarchives.com/ or
>    https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-usenet-archive.
> 
> Many(most?) of the historically popular groups are available, and that
> includes pretty much everything in the comp.* and sci.* hierarchies.
> But searching is not easy, and if you're looking for something
> esoteric you may not find it.

Some of the better known sources are also available on FTP servers.
E.g., I think Vixie's cron(8) is available like this.

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Thread

Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Wojciech Zabołotny <wzab@ise.pw.edu.pl> - 2020-11-26 23:11 +0000
  Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> - 2020-11-26 15:23 -0800
    Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Wojciech Zabołotny <wzab@ise.pw.edu.pl> - 2020-11-26 23:35 +0000
      Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> - 2020-11-26 15:50 -0800
  Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2020-11-26 19:01 -0700
    Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2020-11-26 23:14 -0500
      Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2020-11-28 00:53 -0700
        Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2020-11-29 03:57 -0500
          Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2020-11-29 05:30 -0700
    Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Wojciech Zabolotny <wzab01@gmail.com> - 2020-11-27 04:40 -0800
      Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2020-11-28 00:47 -0700
        Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2020-11-29 04:16 -0500
          Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2020-11-29 02:33 -0800
          Re: Changes in Google Groups - sources posted to Usenet lost forever? Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2020-11-29 05:55 -0700

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