Gopher

Anyone use Gopher? Thoughts on it, a revival, the protocol itself, etc

List of servers:
archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Gopher

Gopher (protocol) Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

These servers are accessible with the following extension from within FF:
addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/overbiteff/

Benefits?
Light weight, low data, text based, no JS shit - why isn't Gopher more known? It is reminiscent of old days of more pure html based sites on usenet and older internet

"The Gopher protocol is a TCP/IP application layer protocol designed
for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the
Internet. The Gopher protocol was strongly oriented towards a
menu-document design and presented an alternative to the World Wide
Web in its early stages, but ultimately HTTP became the dominant
protocol. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective
predecessor of the World Wide Web.

The protocol was invented by a team led by Mark P. McCahill at the
University of Minnesota. It offers some features not natively
supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on
information stored on it. Its text menu interface is well-suited to
computing environments that rely heavily on remote text-oriented
computer terminals, which were still common at the time of its
creation in 1991, and the simplicity of its protocol facilitated a
wide variety of client implementations. More recent Gopher revisions
and graphical clients added support for multimedia. Gopher was
preferred by many network administrators for using fewer network
resources than Web services.

Gopher's hierarchical structure provided a platform for the first
large-scale electronic library connections. Gopher has been described
by some enthusiasts as "faster and more efficient and so much more
organised" than today's Web services. The Gopher protocol is still in
use by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely
supplanted by the Web, a small population of actively maintained
servers remains."
Link: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0Gopher%20%28protocol%29

Other urls found in this thread:

therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/299-New-gopher-on-the-prairie.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

yes

its great

What ever happened to that gopherchan?

I toy around on it from time to time, but there really isn't that much content. We need to get more people to start putting content up.

What kind of content?

Not sure. I think it would be a great format for instructional PDFs and the like.

zafiro17 over on Pipedot did some work with gopher a while back, I think he mirrored his personal site on it.

therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/299-New-gopher-on-the-prairie.html

kurwa

Only one I've seen is this:
gopher://gopher.su/1/board

And I'm still looking for Orbquest!

old oldfag here. There was no point to gopher other than working within the limitations of serial terminals as found in library systems. Compare it to lynx + web with a page designed for it, why would you choose gopher today?

Go fuck yourself.

Fair point, I suppose that would be just as good. Shame not enough design those sort of html pages too

Damnit. I cannot get overbite and requestpolicy play nice. The only way to view gopher pages properly is to turn off requestpolicy entirely

Because the normal web is going to shit.
Because it forces a consistent paradigm.
Because the implementation is much more simple, which has ramifications for stability and security.
Because it's fun.

Hmmm, had no problems myself with overbite + NoScript. Maybe until after you're done browing disable it and/or temporily get NoScript?

I've messed around with it a bit, it seems pretty comfy but I couldn't find much using it like I can with the normal web. Will have to check it out some more.

Great argument.

I made some inane shitpost on it and never went back.

I guess you use Firefox, so I recommend you creating another profile:
firefox -ProfileManager
Then, you start a new session with:
firefox -P newprofile -no-remote

I have two Seamonkey profiles, one with all the security add-ons like
noscript and request policy and another one without them (actually,
just Overbite), so I don't have to disable and restart stuff all the
time.

Hey, piss off you bloody web fag!

Yeah. I have several profiles already. I just hate to use them. I can get most things to work with my main profile.

$ gopher

Overbite doesn't work with e10s, you can spawn a non-e10s window for gopher stuff via vile -> New Non-e10s Window and use overbite/gopher URIs in that window without restricting the whole profile to non-e10s.

wut?

I meant "File".

I googled it. I'm still using 47.0.1 dev edition with e10s disabled (that's the default.) I haven't upgraded yet because My computer is dirty and it overheats when I try to compile the update. Bought a can of air today to do it with.

I guess it doesn't matter though, since I'm not using e10s anyway. I'll just make a profile specifically for gopher