Fandom resource: Usenet

Usenet was an e-mail-driven precursor to message boards. It began in 1980 and technically still exists. To read Usenet posts, Google Groups (for the time being) will show you their entire archive of posts. DO NOT CLICK ON RANDOM SPAM. You will see a lot of random spam, NSFW spam, malicious spam. Spam. Worse, your sorting options are not useful. To search and make this archive useful: You will need to filter by date. Google's instructions for filtering by date may not be up to date (or weren't when I was writing the Cypher).

I would recommend doing this with keyboard and mouse, not phone. I really wouldn't want to be the result of someone who's just questing for information, accessing a weird link by accident. I'm not trying to baby/insult anyone, I'm trying to prevent accidents and respect your cybersecurity.

First: go to your Usenet newsgroup of choice. For instance, DO NOT CLICK ON RANDOM SPAM, https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.x-files/ is their page for alt.tv.x-files. You can check https://fanlore.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_Newsgroups for fandom-related newsgroups and edit the Google Groups URL in your browser accordingly.

To deal with the spam problem, and really to page back far enough to see something from, say, last year (much less 1995), use search operators. The search bar at the top will find 'conversations' (post threads) and you want to enter in a date range in this format: after:1999-12-25 before:2000-01-01. Now that that's pasted in and you hit Enter, you'll see only Usenet threads from Dec. 25, 1999, to January 1, 2000. Change your dates as desired. You'll notice that Google only files these by last-post-in-thread, so if you want to look at what these fandom social groups were doing during any major social events, you may need to include posts from a while afterwards to find the major threads.

You can add a space and then any search parameters you want into the search bar, to find fanfic, particular character mentions, topics, memes, things you want to know more about, etc. It can be really neat to enter in a different fandom of the time, or a name/handle, to see what presence some artists and creators had in the webspace. You will very often find new things to look up, especially on the Wayback Machine, whether it's terms used, fan works mentioned, or any sort of thing. I certainly had no idea that there was a major Usenet X-Files meme roleplay group with all its attendant drama... (or what social dynamics were very visible in various fandoms. You don't know what you don't see, and the passage of time obscures things far too well).