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Where Can I Get Free, Read/Post Usenet Access?

Posted by Cliff on from the free-news dept.

Phaedras asks: "G'day. I live in Germany, and have an Internet connection from a simple ISP, no email, webpage or other services included. (It's cheap, of course. You need that in Germany, at our usage costs...) Now I would like to have access to the Usenet, but can't find a free provider out there that will do that. I'm talking something like a webpage where i can call up articles and post back. Surely something like that must exist, and I'd be most grateful if someone could point me to such a provider." After a quick search of the web, I found a couple of lists which list a few servers offering free NNTP access. You might want to check them out. Be aware that Your Milage May Vary with these services.

25 comments

  1. I use remarq.com by Stalemate · · Score: 2

    I use http://www.remarq.com and it works nicely. It's free and it will do exactly what you need.


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  2. Free Usenet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    generally stinks. If it's a good server (lots of groups, decent bandwidth, up-to-date articles) it doesn't take long for the word to get around, the server gets overloaded, the admin realizes that everyone and their brother is using them for a free feed, and the admin shuts off access. ?p? Most of the free feeds that "stick around" don't offer very many newsgroups, and have large lags (days) between when stuff is posted and when it is available/readable.?p? Oh, and free feeds don't have much pr0n either ;)

  3. NewsGuy is pretty good too.. by Hogarth · · Score: 1

    A company called NewsGuy has varying levels of access, including a basic free web-based service. http://www.newsguy.com (Their paid "Extra" usenet feed has all the binaries groups and is killer.)

    1. Re:NewsGuy is pretty good too.. by DeadSea · · Score: 1

      It appears that even their lowest level of service is not $25 per year. Their "extra" service is $69 per year.

  4. Related question by crisco · · Score: 2
    How about a web based interface to a particular news server? See, sometimes I'm behind a proxy and only have web access, but I'd like to connect to certain nntp servers that are carrying specialized topics (news.php.net and forums.macromedia.com are two examples). I have looked and couldn't find anything, either it isn't really out there or I was using the completely wrong way to search.

    There was a PHP portal thing that kind of included the feature as an afterthought but I didn't get it working very good. Maybe I should re-evaluate that or figure out the code and fix it myself.

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    1. Re:Related question by LiNT_ · · Score: 1
      You can check out Webusenet. I kinda hate recommending them as they have had some MAJOR problems as of late. Webusenet is the same company who runs usernetserver.com one of the major premium new services.

      You should also check out alt.binaries.news-server-comparison or something like that (do a search on *news*server*). You can good some good recommendations in there as well as see some the problems usenetserver.com has been facing lately. Despite all the complainers in the group, overall, usenetserver.com is a pretty good service.

      Hope it helps,
      LiNT

  5. deja.com by caver · · Score: 1

    Allows both reading and writing.

  6. Re:[Mostly OFFTOPIC] Which reminds me by ddwalker · · Score: 1

    Were you running tin with any switches? I think I ran it as tin -r or something like that...Don't remember, as its been years since I did it. I seem to remember that running it WITH certain switches made it a very nice interface, while without the switches, it was virtually useless.

  7. Re:Whats the point? by luckykaa · · Score: 1

    Does the US have regional groups? the uk.* heirarchy has a pretty good sig/noise ratio still, but I haven't been able to handle any of the alt or rec groups for a while.

    On any given group, you can almost guarentee various flavours of spam, a couple of "You all suck" posts, some people having a private crossposted flamewar about something unrelated to most of the groups (Apple vs. MS crossposted to all Apple, MS, Linux, BeOS, Amiga, and programming groups is quite common), and a few quiet people talking on topic.

  8. How about Deja? by Bake · · Score: 1

    I've been using Deja for about 4 years now and from day one I've been quite satisfied with their service. They don't offer any of the binary groups though, but they make it up by providing an excellent search engine.

    Note, I am not on Deja's payroll nor have I ever been one or will be one in the near future.

  9. [Mostly OFFTOPIC] Which reminds me by FascDot+Killed+My+Pr · · Score: 1

    Remembering the halcyon days of yesteryear (1993-5) when I frequented a number of idyllic newgroups, I fired up a tin on my home Linux box. WTF? I couldn't make hide or hair of this piece of crap software (and I used it for about a week). It took, literally, several minutes to start up, I could never remember how to move from group view to subject view to message view (and back) and I had no idea how to subscribe/unsubscribe. Also, no one ever responded to my posts--leading me to wonder if they were actually being posted (I realize that if they weren't it might not be the fault of my reader).

    I remember using (and liking) nn back in the day but didn't find it on my machine. What good non-graphical (nostalgia value, mostly) newsreaders are there for Linux? Or was I just misusing tin? How about for the Mac (for my wife)?
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    1. Re:[Mostly OFFTOPIC] Which reminds me by c170 · · Score: 1

      For the Mac, it's hard to beat MT-Newswatcher http://www.best.com/~smfr/mtnw/. Real fast, multi-threaded, and good filtering capabilities.

    2. Re:[Mostly OFFTOPIC] Which reminds me by RGRistroph · · Score: 1

      Pine is useable, actually pretty good. Gnus (emacs and XEmacs package) is the best, no competition. But it takes a while to learn all of it's features. It should be perfectly useable as a basic reader/poster without reading too much info pages though -- pop up your preference of emacs or XEmacs, and do M-x gnus.

      I generally advise new users of gnus to try XEmacs at first, and use the pull down mousey menus (horrors!!!) to find the various list-all-groups and subscribe-group and post-article type functions; you can remember the keys which are listed in the menu, and go back to using emacs or turn off the menus after a while.

      But that's only if you have some inability to do M-x info. For some reason a lot of people are extremely resistent to using info.

      By the way, gnus is also an extremely good mail handler also. It is pretty easy (well, ok, copy the elisp of someone who already did it and edit the regexp's to fit your situation) to make it map your various mailing lists into their own little newsgroup like folders. It makes much more sense to read mailing lists in this fashion rather than have them mixed in amoung all the personal mail you actually read.

      I've been planning to set up my gnus to have a folder for each of my web-based mail accounts, such as yahoo, hotmail, etc. I know you can do it because I've seen people who did it, I just haven't copied their elisp yet.

    3. Re:[Mostly OFFTOPIC] Which reminds me by luckykaa · · Score: 1

      I seem to remember there were a lot of complaints about the university switching from tin to pine for usenet because pine wasn't threaded. Is this tright, or was that just an old version of pine?

      As far as newsreaders go, slrn is pretty cool by all accounts. I use tin and leafnode. tin seems to be designed for fast networks.

  10. anonymous posting by AnonymousCowhand · · Score: 1

    just started trying this service: http://anon.xg.nu seems quick, for now...

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  11. emacs/slashdot. by willis · · Score: 1

    Hell yes! that would be HELLOF tight...

    Damn... would you have a slashdot-mode? (so that there are handy shortcuts for moderating, collapsing a thread, etc.) or hmmm...

    Taco, you listening?

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  12. Whats the point? by Mullen · · Score: 3

    What the point of using Usenet now a days; it sucks.

    One, you can't get good porn on it anymore. All the right wing nazi anti-porn weenies cancel parts of the multi-part postings, so you can never get the whole message/pic.

    Two, the noise to signal ratio is so bad with Usenet. You have to read about 100 messages to get just alittle bit of information. That is not worth it to me.

    Three, there is so much traffic that you can't keep up with it and there is too many people talking at once. A newsgroup with tens of thousands of readers and posters is too much. Slashdot is becoming the same way. That is why I like the Ask Slashdot that don't show up on the main page. Lots of signal, no noise.

    Four, can't find a good free server. I want to get a feed to my home computer, but as someone pointed out, once everyone finds out and the server gets smoothered.

    I tell you, the epoche of Usenet was back in 90-94' where there was few noise and lots of signal. You actually knew the people on Usenet. You knew their personality, and you kinda knew what they knew and they did not. Usenet is a big city with too many "faceless" people on it. I like the small and old town Usenet of yester year.

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    1. Re:Whats the point? by atoms · · Score: 1

      Filter! usenet is the only hope for a peoples' internet, so you old timers need to adjust and get involved in fixing it, rather than just give up.

    2. Re:Whats the point? by JimB · · Score: 1

      I hate to side with someone who's given up, but we tried like hell to stop the original spammers on Usenet. The infamous "Green Card" Lawyer fucks. [Talk about someone who should have been taken out back and summarily shot !] [Circa 1992, we did "win", in a limited fashion.] The "fixing" of Usenet, and trying to maintain a peoples internet, is a 480 hour per day job. I would like to have a life.
      JB
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  13. gnus is cool! by FascDot+Killed+My+Pr · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the tip, gnus is pretty cool. Only one thing I can't figure out (and I've been all over info): I can list "all groups" (A A) but when I try to search them for a regexp (A M) it just searches the contents of .newsrc. How do I save the "all groups" info out .newsrc for searching? Or don't I want to do that?
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    1. Re:gnus is cool! by RGRistroph · · Score: 1

      I'm not a gnus expert, I just want to be. I don't have a news server to try out A M on right now, but what I used to do was list all groups ( 'L' ) and then C-s to search through them. Not very efficient. I did notice that sometimes listing something like "comp*" would not work but "comp.*" would, so maybe those regexps are interpreted differently. But I don't remember the conditions for that.

      I would say it was time for this thread to migrate to gnu.emacs.gnus or comp.emacs. Much more help there ;)

  14. A searchable/ranked list of open NNTP servers by Steve+Smithies · · Score: 3

    http://newssearch.pilum.net

  15. The real question by RGRistroph · · Score: 3

    What free usenet service can I use from X/Emacs and gnus, not through a web based interface ?

    I know there was some elisp floating around that allowed you to search deja through gnus. Does that still work given deja's recent changes ? Is it possible that gnus could use the w3 stuff to interface with one of the web based newsreader/posters ?

    And -- here's the big question: if that is possible, can someone hack that interface so that I can browse slashdot from emacs ? Wow. That would be awesome.

  16. Free NNTP Listing by Tsian · · Score: 1

    www.freenntp.com offers a databse of anonymous NNTP servers. Unfortunately it hasnt been updated in a while.

  17. Newsservers.net by Cyberllama · · Score: 1

    The guy at www.newsservers.net maintains a good list and he checks it often to show which servers are still up. This is the best list I've ever found.