BT Usenet to cease

[rick]

Received this email form BT today:

Your Usenet service is changing

...

On 3 December, we're stopping the Usenet service that comes with your broadband because our partnership with Giganews is coming to an end. (Giganews provide the Usenet service, which you see as news.btinternet.com in your email programme.)

But don't worry. If you want to carry on using the service after then, they've got a great offer for all BT Broadband customers. Get better features at a special discount

If you sign up for a subscription with them, you won't just get to keep the service you know and love, you'll also get some extra features - like 24/7 support and better security.

And that's not all. They'll give you 10% off their standard monthly price, and on top of that:

50% off the Diamond plan for the first two months, or 50% off any other Giganews plan for the first month.

Don't miss out ? offer ends 31 March 2015

To find out more about Giganews subscriptions, the extra features and how to claim your special discount, go to bt.com/giganews. (You can only access this link using your BT Broadband.)

Thanks for choosing BT.

Libby Barr Managing Director, Customer Care

[Bob Eager]

[nemo]

[rick]

. On advice here I switched to AIOE news servers some weeks ago. Also about 10x faster that BT's services

[fred]

In article , rick writes

A bit like a Skoda dealer telling their customers that they're changing the way they are servicing your car, "we'll be crushing it so you never have to worry about servicing it ever again . . . . "

Mind you I suppose it's difficult to put a spin on, "your service is ending because we are a bunch of penny pinching cnuts . . . . "

[Chris French]

In message , fred writes

Tat's the nature of consumer broadband, where price is a (possibly the most) significant consideration on the whole.

Anyway, I imagine 95% of the BT broadband customers had no idea what it was on about anyway :-)

[Huge]

That few? More like 99.9%

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It's a reason I left my last ISP, though. Or one of them. And went to BT fibre. ;-) However, I'd already set up alternative (free) News servers, and since those still worked when I changed to BT, didn't even try the BT feed.

[Cash]

+1

And more reliable than the 'free' ones IMHO.

[Brian Gaff]

Or in this case , Cant be bothered to negotiate another dial department.

Not surprised as nobody makes any money out of Usenet from tracking or adverts. When I started there was no web, We used mail directly via smtp, andnews via large servers at universities which were free as the outside users were but a small percentage of the whole. Gradually more and more people came in and then isps got their own servers as there was not a lot of content otherwise.. Then some idiot invented html and the web and the commercial companies all saw a golden goose on the horizon and the rest is history. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Yes but is it sustainable at their low cost. Indeed where do eternal september get the money to keep their servers running form. I think the main casualties will be binary groups or thir retention times. I wonder how long google will support the archive and keep offering web access to it? I do notice they are removing, indeed have removed the apis for feedburner, turning it into a basic podcast list again, though I strongly suspect they themselves will be using it to track stuff using it but not let anyone else do it! But news groups really do need to be plugged more in my opinion. Brian

[Chris French]

In message , Brian Gaff writes

Binary groups are only normally available via paid for servers (Giganews, Usenet News, Astranews) - at a cost rather more than NIN

It's actually also a cheap way of getting text groups, a GB of news is a lot of text groups (as long as the sub isn'y time limited, and you want to risk the company/service disappearing

I think that boat has sailed :-(

[Sam Plusnet]

I do like the nice phrasing "Our partnership with Giganews is coming to an end."

This translates as

"We're cheapskates, so we've decided to stop paying the bill. If you still want it, go buy your own (but do use the link provided so we can get a kick-back for the introduction)"

[Uncle Peter]

- no missing groups, no censorship, huge retent= ion.

-- =

Excuse me, are you reading that paper you're sitting on?

[rick]

On 27/10/2014 19:22, Chris French wrote: nsideration on the whole.

I started on Newsgroups using TRN newsreader back in early 90's (no browsers then) .... I suppose any use of usenet is now a bit niche ....and I suppose 'old hat'

With so many forums on a web platform, with benefits of categories, ability to add attachments etc. Maybe usenet will ultimately just die out.

[Huge]

Web forums are technically inferior to Usenet in just about every respect.

The main reason that service providers prefer web forums is that they can be monetised, whereas Usenet cannot.

Or go back to the good old days when only geeks knew about and used it.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

However, it would also seem that the average punter prefers them.

[Timothy Murphy]

Has somebody done a survey?

[Chris J Dixon]

That may well be true, but consider newspapers. Would you equate popularity with quality?

Chris

[Dave Liquorice]

Beacuse they don't know any better? To most "the internet" is just the world wide web, not everything else that it is used for and without which our society would immediatly come to a crashing halt.

Another who was on the internet when the pages on the WWW could be indexed in a small paper book and search was via WAIS or Gopher.