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Are Public NNTP Servers a Thing of the Past?
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?"
http://pubnews.netcom.net.uk/
It requires a (free) registration, but it's quite good, it carries a good portion of the hirercy, and usually updates quickly enough.
But on general, yes, free (of any good) NTTP services are *rare*.
I'd to resort to using my ISP's NTTP service because of this, which is sub-optimal at best.
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Search Google for "public nntp servers" and you'll see many services that scan the 'net for such machines.
http://www.newzbot.com is a good one.
This thread in misc.consumers.frugal-living (which I frequent) has several tips.
Method of processing duck feet
1. Teranews.com - 50mb/day for free but you have to enter a credit card number (they hope people will upgrade their accounts plus probably cuts down on abuse). They don't bill your credit card number nor automatically push you up into the next paying category so you don't have anything to worry about. I've been using them with the free account for a couple months and in general they are decent...
2. news.cis.dfn.de - only text groups, was faster for me than teranews but I haven't used them for a while (forgot account info), have to wait to be approved but it doesn't take too long. So far I'd have to say this is the best deal all around...
FWIW, it appears Comcast has decided to provide a giganews account for its subscribers. You have to "activate" the account, and it has a 1 Gb/month limit. So maybe I won't be in such a hurry to switch to another cable/ISP company...
You just haven't looked hard enough. There's an alt newsgroup about free newsservers (hint, hint) that you might want to investigate.
There's a guy who works at an ISP. As an experiment, he's running one himself. The experiment consists of two servers, one for text (anyone can read, and you can post from it if you send him a polite email), and a read-only one for binaries (from which anyone can read, but it's frequently "busy", as he limits the number of simultaneous connections with the outside world.)
His completeness and retention on binaries beats the hell out of most ISP-based servers.
The result is that you can get most of your music from your own ISP (assuming you have an ISP that has a decent USENET feed), and use his public server for any missing parts. Fewer repost requests mean a lighter load.
Incidentally, a full binaries feed is about 350GB per day. Holy fsck.