The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Usenet newsgroups are cached and duplicated by numerous servers, and redundancy is a very important factor in preservation of data.
When it comes to sharing some trivia and local information, many individuals are using blogs and CMS'es (content management systems). An example could be the bulletin of a small sports community, with information about the competitions, winners etc.
Is it a good idea to a create Usenet newsgroup, or use an existing group, for sharing such information and preserving it for future generations due to heavy duplication? Are really all Usenet messages archived, starting from the beginning? Are the organizations storing them planning to continue to do so in future? The time of Usenet seems to be over, as it has been replaced by specialized fora and Q&As from one side, and the social portals from the other.
lechlukasz
I would not consider Usenet a viable archival strategy. Not now nor in the past. Yes, it's true that storage of content is distributed and by design duplicated, but the control over such parameters as storage time is entirely in the hands of third parties who may have no interest in your particular content, and they are by no means obliged to provide you (or anyone else, really) with access to their archives.
Not all of Usenet is archived. There are many hierarchies which are only
available in certain regions or to users of certain ISPs (or Usenet
server providers), and there are hierarchies which are generally
excluded from archiving (alt.binaries.* comes to mind). Also, you'd
probably be hard pressed to find a publicly available archive that goes
back a significant amount of time. DejaNews, which got bought by Google,
had a quite good archive, and I do believe that Google is allowing
access to all of it, but last I heard it wasn't really searchable in a
practical way.
NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol, the protocol that Usenet clients and servers use to talk to each other) is largely a best-effort protocol. Not all news posts are guaranteed to be on every server (though usually they do end up that way eventually), and they are not guaranteed to be delivered to each server in the order of their creation. Different posts may be delivered through entirely different servers. This is all a product of NNTP's initial design, where it had to run over such arcane transport protocols as UUCP as well as TCP/IP (and many others; "everyone" running TCP/IP is a relatively new invention, and now we are moving into a mixed protocol world again as we head into a combined IPv4/IPv6 Internet).
I don't know exactly how the process would go for getting a new newsgroup into the major archives. That would probably depend on their configuration, which is a factor you don't control. You could contact the administrators and ask for your group to be included if it doesn't show up in their archives, but that's about it as far as control over what is archived goes. The posts to be archived would still have to make it to them, however and obviously, and they would almost certainly only archive content from the point in time of inclusion of the newsgroup into their archive. I don't see one Usenet archive(r/provider) going out of their way to track down copies of previous posts.
Access for regular users is limited. While there are both free and fee-based Usenet servers available to the general public, and software is available for the taking, very few people these days are likely to install and configure a NNTP client. So while technically most anyone who has Internet access will be able to access Usenet if they put in the effort, few people put in the effort.