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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.*
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.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
You said yourself that AOL doesn't. @Home put a limit on downloading once they declared bankruptcy. Comcast.net hasn't decided what its going to do, but suggested that if they do offer a news server, it will be limited. The only places that seem to have a news server are universities and commercial sites. With the heavy loads of all the binaries, it can't be cheap to run one.
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
What we need is an easy to install NNTP server for Windows, with a built in client. Napster might be illegal, and gnutella might suck, but usenet is a tried and true method of distributing warez. And it's probably legal to run the server, to boot.
I hate to say this, but you can pay for access to newsfeeds.com's nntp-servers! I do, and it's worth every öre! :-)
I get superfast access to about 10 specialized nntp-servers and a total daily download-limit of almost 10GB!
I have UBH configured to automagically collect pr0n-videos from all of the newsservers and 600+ newsgroups. Then I have another script that creates thumbnails (using mplayer -vo png and imagemagick) and beautiful html-pages with all kind of info (size, length, codecs etc) and uploads everything to FreeNet (Key not yet announced - still under development)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
There are two that I know of for Windows: Hamster (page is German), which is GPL'ed, and MyNews, by the creator of yEnc, which is shareware and includes a built-in newsreader. There are probably more but those seem like the two dominant players in this very small field :)
However, both of those are really oriented towards P2P more than what the poster was looking for. And I don't even want to think about what kind of smackdown would be waiting for a home broadband user running an open news server.
Try news://newscache3.freenet.de/
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...
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.
news.cis.dfn.de works great for the non-binary newsgroups. Registration is mandatory and manual but free and quick. Great groups coverage and articles are retained for quite a while. I've been using it for a couple of months now, no complaints.
Of course we can't expect companies / universities / people to run free access for the rest of the world to share. Look what happens when slashdot posts one link.. most independant web sites get slashdotted. What would happen if one site opened up access to all the newsgroups they had?
No one company has the bandwidth to support the entire internet's access. Once places started closing their doors, it was a run for the hills. Just like most public services, if there aren't enough outlets to support the drain on resources, we overtax what we have and cause it to close down too. The only way to get access opened again on public servers would be to have a few really large companies open up.. that would be the only way to lower the drain on everyone.
pretty much. I think that you can find the news groups, but not sure if they are like they used to be. You have to realize that now with yahoo clubs / yahoo groups (becoming one by the way) and deja, the alt.xxx.xxx are fading away. The new groups are supposely easier to use when you learn them and also allow you to do things to reduce spam. I also think they give the companies running them more control, by having adult sections and things like that. The old alt groups and news groups did not have anything like that. What you probably need is a good news reader program. I think the only one that I can think of that you can use under windows is with netscape. There are others out there I'm sure. I know under Linux there are several.
Only 'flamers' flame!
AT&T Broadband considered it a freebie and as it wasn't a specifically paid-for service didn't worry if it was messed up or down for awhile. Cox doesn't offer Usenet at all. Apparently the merged beast of the two will offer Usenet initially but with no promises (likely to become a tiered product.) This is pretty typical of much of the industry these days.
Universities are also dropping Usenet; I got an announcement this week that Northeastern University will be discontinuing it and is referring folks to Google or other commercial services. Others are following the same path as copyright issues, costs, lack of academic relevance, and sheer volume become problematic - they're finding it easier to just offload the comparatively few users to custom services.
Thus the two communities that were once most involved are moving away. Where once everyone at your typical ISP followed at least a few newsgroups or had fond memories of such now the staff is just as likely to say "like AOL chat?" and have no idea what you're talking about. Without those folks to champion it Usenet is seen as an odd step-child: Something used by warez-traders, porn freaks and whiners perpetually asking that so-and-so get dropped because they dissed the other. Without the free local access university students are also unlikely to become enamored of Usenet and request it of their ISPs in the future, contribute their free time (many of us recall the annual September deluge of newbies making the same mistakes year after year anew.)
Further more with the opening up of online access the Global Village is becoming plagued with Village Idiots. Spammers are legion and have laid waste to many newsgroups. The socially maladjusted are increasingly hard to get dropped and their harrassment techniques are increasingly sophisticated. Much of the conversation has moved off to mailing lists, web-boards, and other richer-content/easily moderated venues.
On an immediate scale the serving and servicing a full feed is increasingly expensive and becoming more so. The ISP-class software can be expensive, the hardware is a capitol cost, the users are generally the "top talkers" (most bandwidth hungry customers) of an ISP and thus among the least profitable under today's pricing models. With only a few percent of a ISPs customers even aware of Usenet it's an attractive cost-saving sacrifice for many.
As to just Googling - that to me seems such a poor interface. They've done a good job of presentation but for following threads on an ongoing basis, setting filters, quoting and responding effectively a good news client is still worlds away better (ok - mebbe not Outlook Express, but about everything else is.) There are any number of good unix clients. Forte Agent on Wintel is decent, has a free version and is once again under active development. MT-Newswatcher is a brilliant variation of the venerable Newswatcher Mac client and has both MacOS & MacOS X version.
For alternatives there are any number of commercial nntp feeds one can sign up for. Median price for a single user is around US$10/month and generally offers a generous though not unlimited transfer allowance. This could probably be shared amongst a few folks if someone were willing to set up the requisite hardware, software, and had the bandwidth. This of course also means administering the feed and funneling back up postings, doing one's own bit to not let spam in.
Ironically one of the few bright spots of all this is Microsoft. Their support newsgroups have been a great success and are receiving ever-increasing amounts of support from within the company. Other vendors offer their own private news servers and groups but the best known generally is MS and it is bringing in a new set of users.
Good luck.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
What takes up all that space? I haven't spent much time on USENET the last few years, but it seems like a lot of the dicussion that used to be on USENET has moved to private mailing lists, Yahoo groups, etc.
The vast majority of that 40GB has got to be warez and pictures. Imagine how many "make money fast" posts it takes to even reach a megabyte, much less a gigabyte.
-Mark
www.teranews.com
You have to sign up for an account and give an email address, but they've never spammed me.
*lol*
But he can google for that newsgroup, and using what he learns there, can find the servers.
Another resource is alt.free.newsservers...
AOL offers usenet access, but it's defintely not NNTP. You need to use their crappy, built-in client to access usenet groups.
A little nit-picky, but accurate.
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
MSN has a NNTP server but it is down so often it is almost like they don't have one. MSN customers can use netnews.msn.com IIRC to grab newsgroups. Earthlink has a news server but it sucks almost as bad at MSN's. It drops messages all the time and is down at least one day of the week every week.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.