On Feb 5, 10:11*pm, wrote:

The ISPs either dropped their USENET servers or dropped binaries from
their servers.
The free access to USENET tends to be without binaries.

Some folks have moved pictures off to sites such as flickr,
but the sense of community is fairly destroyed.

That does not need to be so. Witness the sense of community Facebook
has successfully created: actually self organizing multiple
communities.

A well constructed website can be at least as effective as a usenet
newsgroup in creating a sense of community, and provide benefits that
would be impossible with usenet.

Years ago, Kye and I discussed doing something like this, but it did
not progress far as neither of us had the resources to make it work.
It appears Kye has been able to at least support a usenet server. In
a matter of weeks, I will be hosting my employer's website from my
home office. This means that if I had a machine with enough
capability, I could host such a website. The idea Kye and I discussed
included supporting subscribers being able to store photos, formal
botanical descriptions, culture conditions (daily records of
temperature and humidity, when the plants is watered, fertilized and
how much, plant size through time, production of infloresences/blooms,
&c.), as far as the subscriber wishes. I'd add statistical support so
a user could examine culture and results for those specimens most
similar to their own, checks on specimen identity, &c. With such
data, one could easily submit a query to learn what culture practices
work best given a particular cultivar and ambient humidity and
temperature. I'd even have a section for vendors to publish
information on what they have available, so if you're looking for a
particular cultivar, it becomes easy to learn who has it, if anyone
does have it; and another section supporting subscribers arranging
trades of plants, back bulbs, &c. (whatever they wish). Adding in web
fora for discussions, and one could make the usenet newsgroups
obsolete.

At present, I just don't have the money to get the hardware required
(though I do have all the requisite software development tools and
skills, and then some), and with my current workload, developing all
of it will take quite some time. The only way I see any of this
happening, though is if someone who can get excited does get
enthusiastic enough to enlist sufficient resources to proceed. I
can't get excited about much these days because the health challenges
I've had recently have been overwhelming. I am pretty tired and
discouraged.

--
Chris Dukes
davej eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. I have two. *Bullshit..

I have two too: snow, and pretty (at least when it is fresh, before
the plows and sanders corrupt it). ;-)

Cheers,

Ted