There are many references to the historical importance of the alt.coffee usenet discussions. For example, in this interview with Greg Scace, they discuss:
Our Deleted Coffee History
Les: You and I first connected in the alt.Coffee forums in the early 2000's. Some of that community history, from 2000 to 2003 is missing from the web. The genesis of third wave specialty coffee started in that forum. In a very short period of time, we had a community spring up, exchanging information and ideas, that were tested and tried by all of us. This quickly sorted out the untested myths and solidified what was relevant and useful, this saved everyone a lot of time.
It would be a tremendous loss if we can not recover that span of our history. (Note to reader , alt.coffee archives have literally gone missing since newsgroups were taken over by Google.)
It's not just the Alt.Coffee forum that has gone missing. Also, independent and personal coffee blogs are being abandoned and deleted. There are the Wayback Machine backups, but, that is not just a simple google search.
A very historically important Google Group in my industry (specialty coffee) has quietly disappeared from existence. I believe that many years back, this old Usenet group called alt.coffee was migrated over to Google Groups and around the same time it fell out of favour, and was mostly replaced by forums such as www.coffee-forum.net and www.coffeegeek.com which users quickly migrated to.
However, much to our dismay, that Google Group has disappeared recently, likely due to dormancy/takeover by spammers, and has left us with no record of the historical development of our industry from the 1990s-2003. The old Usenet group, thankfully, can still be found to a limited extent on some old newsservers such as Giganews, but only posts since June 22nd, 2003.
I hope someone at Google can find a way to reactivate the alt.coffee forum or provide an archive to our industry group, as we would definitely cherish the opportunity to keep these historical records online forever.
I had a contact with a university academic who apparently had stored the archives. I meant to ask him again if these could be recovered, but we might have to wait to the end of the academic year. Thanks for reviving this thread and reminding me.
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