Sad news. News.Individual.NET will discontinue service from September 2027

Timatmarford snipped-for-privacy@marford.uk.com> wrote

It remains to be seen if usenet lasts that long

After 25 years, I didn't bother to renew my sub to it this year, such is my low use of Usenet these days.

Never had a single glitch with it in all that time

Yes, I got the same message. I only use it for this group but it's been particularly good because very little of the carp gets through their filters, and the few odd-bods that do are easily hidden with local filtering.

What are the alternatives? Groups.io is very good, but is only free up to 100 members (perhaps there aren't more than 100 active participants here ... ?). Beyond that size there's a charge, but there's a sponsorship scheme where members can pay towards the cost, with a minimum of 5 USD ... cheaper than News.Individual.NET. What else?

I'm not interested in mailing list as a replacement.

Eternal September is free but has the occasional glitch, maybe now is the time for "Ray" to make the fee mandatory rather than donations optional, to fund it better?

There's giganews/supernews and probably many others who are binaries focussed.

I'm delighted to hear that the sad news is NOT about someone dying!

Curious, I am an n.i.n subscriber but haven't (yet?) had the email.

Update - it was in my junk folder ;-/

Indeed but; I have long felt that a system for notifying members of one's demise would save on speculation.

Mine only turned up about 11am (Tues). You cannot now subscribe but it appears that existing users can use it until it closes, with no further fees.

I'll get a friend to post here when I die, so you can all crack a bottle of champagne to celebrate my death

It works very well as a place for discussions and is much more than being a mailing list. Have you looked at it? Here's an example (for Tom Senior milling machines):

One news client gives me access to the 523 newsgroups I'm currently subscribed to[*]. I'm not interested in going to 523 different places to read them.

Usenet will still be there even after one particular server has shut down. It's just a case of those affected finding a new one.

I suggest that anyone subscribed to NIN creates an account at Eternal September, at least as an interim measure. Maybe there are better options, but it will cost nothing, take a few minutes and mean your connection isn't interrupted when NIN shuts down. You can set it up in your news software to migrate over.

When switching you may (or may not) lose the history of which posts you've already read, but that will diminish in importance as you read posts via the new server. Some news clients allow use of multiple servers, in which case you can run them in parallel.

Theo

I had thought of leaving a farewell message in my outbox with just a post-it note to whoever saying "press send." But I reckon I'm clumsy enough that I'd ham-fistedly report myself as dead at least half a dozen times before it really happened.

As for the Champagne, sorry to disappoint you, TNP, but the bottle I have chilling in the fridge is for an expected birth in the family, not for your demise.

Nick

No disappointment. Mine is waiting for either Putin, Trump or Starmer to vanish from the world stage.

With Solani and E-S, the account closes if you don't use it once in a while. Maybe you could read USENET posts once a month, on your backup-server, to keep your account alive. The interval for this on E-S might be a bit longer (before a non-active account is closed). Just successfully authenticating with the server, should keep the account alive.

Paganini doesn't use an account. For the administrator of it, managing that thing is just as difficult as managing AIOE was.

News.Mixmin.net doesn't use an account, but it is also out of service occasionally and is not really a high speed/high availability server. The only time I post through there, is when testing whether the server is running, for someone.

AIOE didn't use an account, but it got wiped out one day, and while initially it looked like a RAID failure, we don't really know whether someone got into it and tipped it over. When you rent a server in a COLO, "making backups" is tough. Making a backup of a USENET server over the Internet (on a $60 a month rental server), isn't all that easy either. AIOE apparently didn't have a backup, and the admin was in no shape health-wise, to deal with regenerating the server from scratch.

There are other servers, which do not advertise for new clients.

And there is more than one server that has gone "read-only", due to abuse. (The Thai Spam attack, caused one of our servers to go read-only, that was freenews.netfront.net .)

Paul

That is sad news. What will be the next to turn it's toes up, I wonder.

Peter

- The address shown on this posting is false. If you need to contact me then wirte to: peterATpfjamesDOTcoDOTuk

Me neither

Not in my spam folder

Trouble is that there is no way to organise that if no one you know well is into usenet