funny@looking.on.ca (Funny Guy) (08/08/89)
This is the 2nd anniversary of the creation of rec.humor.funny, and it has certainly been an eventful year, to say the least! Coincident with this anniversary, I can also announce that last Thursday the "TeleJoke Round Table" started live operation on the GEnie network. Setting that up took a lot longer than I thought, but GEnie users can now log in and read the same joke you are seeing here. They also have an unmoderated section like our "rec.humor." If you are a GEnie user, drop by and see it. One thing we'll be having on GEnie that we don't have here are things called "real time conferences," where as many members as desire can connect to a big multi-user chat session. GEnie users are a bit overwhelmed with all the stuff coming in from USENET, so it will be a while before they post new jokes that I haven't seen before. Once they do, they will enter my queue and show up in this group a few weeks later. You'll see them come from users at "genie.com" although that site doesn't exist yet. The promise that it should exist some time in the future. This year has seen attempts by a small, but vocal group of people to censor, crush or control this group. Except for the fact that the group is still partially banned at the University of Waterloo, the attempts all failed. Stanford University, which banned the group earlier on this year, recently had the ban revoked by order of the University Senate. We can thank John McCarthy -- Mr. LISP -- and other fine Stanford folk for their efforts there. There were many other attempts, from campaigns in the newspapers to aborted USENET "votes" to opposition to the annual jokebooks. They all made it tough for me but nothing has changed. In the meantime, the group rose to becoming the most popular group on USENET. Brian Reid's estimate is 69,000 -- and group #20 has less than half that figure. While I think Brian's estimate is high, USENET is still one of the most widely read networks in the world, and with the addition of GEnie, and soon Delphi, rec.humor.funny/TeleJoke may very well be the most widely read computer conference in the world -- all dedicated not to computer, but to having fun. It's hard to determine that for sure, but nonetheless I find it astounding. Thanks for you support, folks, and here's looking forward to a coming year that is exciting, but not *quite* as exciting as last year... Here's looking