What's up with rec.games.go?

I just went onto rec.games.go for the first time and half the posts are from this guy constantly ranting about Israel and Palestine.

A load of the newer posts are religious propaganda and dating spam as well.

Does anyone still use this site?

I saw trohde there, but he only came on in 2016 to criticise the group and call for some moderation to be done.

By the way, I saw that long-time Go writer Dieter said that even in the '90s

There was the tiresome rec.games.go with lots of flaming and rare educational material.

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I had to Google it! :grin:

Newsgroups?
Is that even a thing in 2021???
I thought all the Newsgroups thing was dead loooooong time ago.

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They can still be accessed through google.

I think rec.games.go was the centre of English-language Go discussion before the founding of Sensei’s Library in 2000, and it retained some prominence until GoDiscussions was made in the mid-2000s, apparently as a reaction to all the shitposting on r.g.g.

GoDiscussions metamorphised into Life in 19x19 in 2010.

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It’s amusing how condemnation of r.g.g. is absolutely universal on the old SL homepages.

I have followed some r.g.g. discussions in the past, but it must have been more than 10 years ago that I was there last.

I mostly remember huge flame wars between Frank de Groot (writer of Moyo Go Studio software) and other r.g.g. regulars.

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I found more r.g.g. hate, from SL, 2001.

In the one year of [Sensei’s Library’s] existence, I have known of only one “attack” which was immediately deflected … This is truly amazingly little. Perhaps it indicates SL is not widely used at all, or maybe it just goes to show that the good spirit that reigns here is contagious. Contrary to most newsgroups I know (well, I know two) there have been no violent arguments, nor endless threads which pile emotional reaction on emotional reaction.

Why there never can be a flame war on SL: it takes an hour to write a good lengthy flame, but unlike in a newsgroup everyone can delete this flame in approx. 10 secs.

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