A Background

The name smr-usenet has brought a lot of questions from people, namely "why smr-usenet?". As told below the idea of a website to help users with usenet was nurtured in an IRC channel. Since good domain names are hard to find I decided to name the site partially after the channel, ShadowMovieRealm. The rest is history.

The site has visitors from around the world in higher numbers than many people ever imagined. smr-usenet is a labor of love for usenet, countless hours have been spent answering questions and emails and writing pages all in an effort to help people that are interested in usenet.

A Brief History

While sitting in an IRC channel in early September 2000, and answering the same questions over and over from users asking about usenet this site was born. Instead of answering the same questions, the idea was brought forth to put them on a webpage as a sort of FAQ. That way users could find the answers to the most common questions and life for all was much easier. The time and effort put into the site was donated and no profit would be seen for a long time.

smr-usenet.com started with a free come.to address and a free webhost. In the beginning there were three simple (and ugly) pages. As more questions were asked more pages were added to the site. In January 2001 the site was moved from the free host to a paid host and given a badly needed facelift.

Origionally started to answer commonly asked questions, more difficult questions arised such as "Which usenet provider is the best?". The usenet provider reviews were born out of those questions and give users an objective view of each provider and how they rate to each other.

Over the next few months pages were added and refined and a new look was brought in. This new look was highly dependant on javascript and it was a love/hate relationship with the viewers. Traffic dropped drastically and in the end the current look was designed. Very sparse in it's looks but extremetly easy to use and fast to load were the main goals of the new interface. Traffic started returning to normal levels.

With the return of the traffic brought a renewed effort to increase the amount of information on the site and for better ranking on search engines. Those two factors are what smr-usenet is currently striving for.

Usenet came before the world wide web and it is the least understood part of the internet for most people. It was and is the intent of this site to teach whomever it can about the value and interest that usenet can provide.