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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.
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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...
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.
No, it isn't. I checked on installing a NNTP server at the university I work at. The find: for a full feed, it was a feed of over 40gig daily, spiking to 50-60 gig on the weekends. It was nearly two T1s worth of data 24/7, not to mention the disk space. Even with 200 gig of storage, that only gave a 3-5 day retention time. 3 days is pretty sparse. Such a feed almost requires two machines. One to process the incoming feed, and the other to handle clients. That further adds to the obscene cost. Most universities are not doing binaries anymore. We couldn't with out meager budget. Commercial sites are picking up the slack, and the trend seems to be for universities to purchase NNTP access in lieu of running their own.
No sig is worth reading.
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...
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.
*lol*
But he can google for that newsgroup, and using what he learns there, can find the servers.
Learn how to build your own satellite feed like this one (with some stats). Or peruse these links.