Deja Google News Groups

Those of us who still read Usenet proper have probably all seen instances of 10+ year old threads getting a new post by someone who found it on Deja News or it's Google successor. Eg, last month I saw this reply to a twenty five year-old post.

Newgroups: comp.editors
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2021 19:21:33 -0800 (PST)
Injection-Info: google-groups.googlegroups.com; [...]
Message-ID: <42d18ee7-712f-41f4-b4af-dba9988b192an@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Maximum line length in Vi
From: Tejasvi S Tomar <tstomar@outlook...>

On Monday, April 17, 1995 at 12:30:00 PM UTC+5:30, Paul Fox wrote:
> G. Ioannou (gi...@cus.cam.ac.uk) wrote:
> : ed
> : Vim
> : Vile
> : They all worked fine with lines over 2000 characters in length, but I
> : don't know the exact limit.
> lines on vile, at least, are limited by the size of an int.
> anyone know what it is in vim?
> paul
> ---------------------------------
> paul fox, p...@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma)

It seems there isn't any limit. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-vi/9780596529833/ch15s10.html

Anyway today I encountered a new twist on this. Instead of replying to decade(s) old post through Deja Google, someone instead hunted down my Wikipedia user page and answered a question of mine about Usenet II (dead for at least ten years) on the User Talk page. Really, I had no pressing care about why 4gh was used for the "Distribution" header. I knew it was a reference to some sci-fi book, but didn't really care more than that. And if I did care, the Usenet II page at Wikipedia has had the answer for a while: Usenet II, diff=prev, oldid=181389883

(The same person who added the reference in 2008 is the person who who answered me today on User Talk.)

It makes me wonder if people used to (or maybe still do) get the problem of people writing letters about long ago published stuff after finding it in a library.

		C. R. Boffo 123 Main St Small Town 14 January 1958
Mark Twain 345 Taylor St San Francisco
Dear Sir, I am writing to you in regards your piece about the jumping frog trainer that lived in Calaveras County. I don't know if Jim Smiley is training frogs for use in jumping contests, but he should be aware that California law now has mandates about frogs kept for jumping contests. I would also like to say that feeding lead to frogs as that stranger did to Dan'l is just cruel. Yours sincerely, C. R. Boffo

Any relation of "C. R. Boffo" to the .a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_toad "bufo "lick for high" toads" is surely coincidental.