[johnfowles]

I have just refound this old thread and thought it worth resurrecing for the newcomers here
Whilst doing so I will also take the chance to add the text of a web page on my own website regarding the history of the Newsgroup and how that inexorably led to the very existance of corfid
(I cannot use a link to the actual page at the moment because many of my site's html pages have been hacked by some worhless excuse for a human and have extra code inserted that google treats as malware so I am facing the daunting task of downloading my complete website then editing out the garbage. Thanks to Char Mr Google and the Russian equivalent of Google
http://http://yandex.com
for alerting me to the problem
Gordon Lightfoot Newsgroup History
I had composed the following basically as a reply to a short posting on the Newsgroup alt.music.lightfoot
subject:-
A 5-year archive of this newsgroup
at:-

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=...ot/iLb-b973Ed0
the posting had said:- On Jun 29, 4:55 pm, Dan wrote:
Google bought DejaNews.
I am very interested in the history of the Newsgroup, mainly since it was an announcement about the then new Lightfoot chat room
that caught my eye in 1999 and which in turn led to me meeting my future wife and life saver Susan
I therefore researched and composed what became a lengthy and detailed response that was apparently too long for the Newsgroup to accept'
.So rather than waste my efforts I decided to adapt what I had written as this web page
I recall that certainly dejanews was the source of some if not all threads on alt.music.lightfoot when I first discovered the newsgroup back in 1997 my very first posting in reply to somebody named (improbably) Jenney is at:-

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=...A/yQMaCYuO5zAJ
but later in 1999 it was taken over by remarq.com. searching for that name I found an early posting by someone else improbably named "Char" at:-

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=...ot/SVPW1dVgnAQ
one replier was a knowledgable fan with another highly unlikely name:-
Florian Bodenseher
In one of his few newsgroup postings before he launched his own site at:-
http://corfid.com
Wayne Francis had started this usenet newsgroup in November 1994
see his announcement on another newsgroup at:-
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=...I/6QNuUhwOjWwJ
For a very long time Wayne progressively honed a series of detailed Lightfoot FAQ pages as Newsgroup threads
It is well worth reading a posting Wayne made in 1997 that had as the subject:-
Who Am I? (was - Who Is Wayne Francis?) at:-
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=...c/_m_CZvxIbwoJ
in which Wayne responded to a question from Bill Weitz:-
"Who are you Wayne, and how do you know what you know, and how come you don't have a GL page on the net?"
His detailed response included paying tribute to Matthew Fifer's then existing pioneering GL website
One of many Archived copies of which, from 2001, is at:-

http://web.archive.org/web/200112121...oot/index.html
Wayne did conclude:-
"That being said, I have for some time now been conceptualizing my own Lightfoot page and hope to put those ideas into motion
within the year. It will in no way be in competition with the existing site, but will hopefully be sufficiently different in content and style to stand alone on its own merits.
Wayne"
and of course rather more than his predicted "year" later in 1999 Wayne's cornucopia at:-
http://lightfoot.ca
was launched which is basically Wayne's Newsgroup FAQs formulated into a web site
initially at least and as Wayne still acknowledges at the bottom of his main page
"Created and maintained by Wayne Francis. Design by Bill Weiss."
Anyway to return to Arnold 's main question:-
"But in case they don't, is there a software program that will automatically download and store an entire newsgroup? I'd like to
archive this and a few others for posterity...and of course no one has the time to download the posts one-by-one."
once upon a time I could get Internet Exploder's built in Outlook Express to list newsgroups and after updating then whatever
threads were available were in fact automatically saved on my hard drive as a file alt.music.lightfoot.dbx
in a folder called funnily enough "outlook express"
I have one such collection from september 2005 archived on my external hard drive as a 1.98MB file but my PC cannot seem
to open it right now.But there is a basically empty "outlook" folder on my main hard drive