the end of an era

since i'm generally known for being blunt anyways i'll get right to the point - comp.virus is gone...

of course, in any practical sense comp.virus has been gone for a good long time, but even after all this time i've kept my newsreader subscribed to the group hoping it would eventually come back... it's finally time to remove the subscription - the group itself was slated for removal on june 25 2007...

i have fond memories of the group - back before i even got on the internet i read comp.virus thanks to an internet<->fidonet gateway... what i found was a place with a lot of knowledgeable people talking about exactly the kind of thing i wanted to read about - viruses... oh sure, there was the fido VIRUS and VIRUS_INFO echos (in fact those still exist, though they're mostly unused now-a-days) but i wanted more...

of course it wasn't long after i found comp.virus that it fell out of use (for reasons that nick fitzgerald has probably explained too many times already) and alt.comp.virus was used as a substitute (which proved interesting for all sorts of reasons)... alt.comp.virus (and the more recent alt.comp.anti-virus) are unmoderated, however, and without that control over the quality of the content most of those knowledgeable folks i was introduced to first in comp.virus and then in alt.comp.virus eventually moved on to less noisy pursuits...

i guess the good old days have been gone for a long time, but the removal of comp.virus is like going back to your old neighborhood and discovering one of your favourite spots has been turned into a parking lot...

oh well, we still have the FAQ i guess...