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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?"
I've found multiple public NNTP servers located at colleges and 4 year institutions that offer public read and write, but the majority of them don't offer access to alt.* groups. My opinion on this is because they can't afford the bandwidth abuse that comes from having alt.binaries.* open to the public. I know when I was running my NNTP server at the college I work for I was recieving 10GB daily of alt.* traffic, and that's with the head provider filtering some of the more "warez"ish groups.
Depending on what you are looking for, multiple options exist, but I've yet to find a public access NNTP server with a full alt.* feed. Of course, most have rec.crafts.brewing, so I really don't go looking for anything in alt.*
Not workable. NNTP server relationships are not automatically established, so everyone who installed this NNTP server for Windows would have to find a news feed and convince the provider to add their new server to the list. Even if we extended NNTP with some sort of automatic feed-finding-and-registration system, there's still the problem that NNTP expects to deliver the entire feed to every server. I don't know about your connection, but that would destroy my DSL, and I'm only interested in a tiny fraction of what I'd be getting.
And, as far as an easy-to-install NNTP client for Windows, well, how about MS Outlook?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
But for about £2/month (yes, UK based) you can get a ClaraNews account, which also gets you a ClaraNet email address (which are utterly rock solid an come with server side filtering) and basic dialup.
They're not wonderful (if you're after binaries, they're more a suppliment than a primary feed, partly because they limit you to 256kbps, partly because retention isn't always great in such groups), but they're hard to beat for the price. They even have decent support.