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Are Public NNTP Servers a Thing of the Past?

Posted by Cliff on from the the-extinction-of-another-free-network-service dept.

JPawloski asks: "When I bought this computer, it came with 6 months of AOL for free. Being notoriously frugal, I have used AOL and will continue to until my free time expires; however, the one disadvantage is it does not have a NNTP server. I find using Deja by Google cumbersome and have a number of problems (updating every 9 or so hours is one of them). I started a search of public NNTP servers on the Internet, and tried literally 50 of them, but none of them work. I even looked a directories of public news servers and fared no better. Are public news servers a thing of the past now that most ISPs offer it standard? Does anyone else out there still use a public news server, and, if so, how does it work compared to the alternatives (deja.com, etc.). Any other recommendations?"

3 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How cruel... by Tackhead · · Score: 3, Funny
    > The poor guy can't read alt.* groups, so you tell him to read an alt newsgroup...

    *lol*

    But he can google for that newsgroup, and using what he learns there, can find the servers.

  2. Re:Not all ISPs offer them by Ben+Jackson · · Score: 3, Funny
    It was nearly two T1s worth of data 24/7
    That's a fine way to express the bandwidth, but not many serious news servers (ones attempting to carry everything with good retention times) use land lines to get their feeds.

    Learn how to build your own satellite feed like this one (with some stats). Or peruse these links.

  3. Re:Pay! by Thing+1 · · Score: 2, Funny
    ...configured to automagically collect pr0n-videos from all of the newsservers...

    ...beautiful html-pages with all kind of info (size, length, codecs etc)...

    Man, I must be getting old. The kids' language keeps changing. I mean, I can understand size and length in relation to porn stars, but what part of the anatomy does "codecs" refer to?

    (You can make it ugly by replacing the "d" with a "t"...)

    --
    I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.