usenet

A suckless Usenet newsgroup archive viewer built with Next.js and SQLite.

Renders 854,000+ messages from 12 newsgroups (1981-2014) with a Plan 9 aesthetic. Full-text search via FTS5. No JavaScript frameworks, no client-side bloat — server-rendered pages with plain CSS.

Features

Browse newsgroups with paginated message listings
Read individual posts with quote-level coloring
Full-text search across all groups or scoped to one
Prev/next navigation between messages
Import pipeline that cleans and splits raw Google Groups / NNTP dumps

Architecture

Next.js 16 — App Router, server components only, no client JS
SQLite + better-sqlite3 — Single-file database with FTS5 full-text search
Plan 9 aesthetic — IBM Plex Mono, cyan/tan/beige window chrome inspired by acme/rio

Data

The import script handles:

Clean JSON (e.g. comp.os.minix with proper per-message metadata)
Concatenated Google Groups blobs — hundreds of posts mashed into single JSON entries, split on From <id> boundaries with NNTP header extraction
Deduplication by Message-ID
Date normalization from RFC 2822 and ISO formats

Currently imported groups span alt.folklore.computers, comp.lang.c, comp.lang.lisp, comp.os.minix, comp.sources.unix, comp.unix.wizards, net.general, net.micro.apple, net.news, net.unix-wizards, news.announce.newgroups, and sci.math.

Usage

# Import archive data into SQLite
npm run import /path/to/usenet/archive

# Re-split concatenated blobs (if importing raw Google Groups data)
npx tsx scripts/resplit.ts

# Build the subject/author index (after any import; ~25s, safe to re-run)
npm run index:meta

# Run dev server
npm run dev

# Production
npm run build && npm start

Search syntax

word, "exact phrase", prefix*, -exclude, a OR b, from:pike, subject:minix, group:comp.os.plan9, after:1990, before:1992-06. Sort by best match, newest or oldest. Keyboard: j/k next/prev, u up, / search. See /help.

Schema

CREATE TABLE newsgroups (
  name TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  message_count INTEGER,
  first_date TEXT,
  last_date TEXT
);

CREATE TABLE messages (
  id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
  newsgroup TEXT NOT NULL,
  original_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
  from_addr TEXT,
  date TEXT,
  subject TEXT,
  message_id TEXT,
  body TEXT
);

CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE messages_fts USING fts5(body, content='messages', content_rowid='id');
CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE meta_fts USING fts5(subject, from_addr, content='messages', content_rowid='id');

License

Public domain.