Giganews

[Ajax]

Does anyone on this list subscribe to it via Giganews?

TIA

[Upscale]

I did for a short period, what do you want to know? I'm currently using Agent Premium News Unlimited. It's a news server provided by the makers of Forte's Agent.

[Todd Fatheree]

Yes. Comcast, at least here, offloaded newsgroup access to Giganews.

todd

[Jack]

Actually it's provided by Supernews or Usenetserver, Forte is just a reseller.

[Jack]

What do you want to know?

[Lee Gordon]

AFIK, all Comcast subscribers get their newsgroup access through Giganews. However, as I recall, when Comcast made the switch, it was not a seamless procedure and they did not do a very good job of publicizing the changes and what steps were necessary to implement them. I imagine I am not the only person who suddenly found himself without Usenet at the time. I called Comcast tech support and it took their guy a fair amount of time to figure out what was wrong. When he finally did it was a simple matter to reconfigure Outlook Express to access Giganews. But I would guess a great many users did not bother to chase down the information I did.

Lee

[Joe Wells]

Yes, I gave up on the ISP provided news servers and now pay for Giganews separately.

[Nova]

My ISP gave up trying to maintain their NNTP servers and recently contracted with Giganews to provide this service. I'd say I'm now using Giganews to access the news groups.

-- Jack Novak Buffalo, NY - USA (Remove "SPAM" from email address to reply)

[brocpuffs]

I do and have for a long time.

Like it very much. I read and download from ;-> a lot of other groups besides the Wreck. Like everybody else is saying, why do you ask? Curious back at you.

James [e-mail]

[Grandpa]

Yup, as a Comcast subscriber its provided as part of the service. I access it and mail via Netscape 7.1, works like a champ.

Grandpa

Ajax wrote:

[Ajax]

I was able to post to this group through Giganews, but I could not download any messages. I am using Agent and for some reason it would not download anything from this group.

After I deleted the group and resubscribed to it, it started downloading again. Go figure.

Thanks for all the replies.

[Bruce Barnett]

When you change news servers, you have to "erase" any history of the articles you've already seen. The article numbers (used to keep track) are different.

[HeyNow]

Joe,

If you're actually paying for Giganews there are a lot of other options out there. It looks like most of the others here that say they use it get free through their ISP. I have the same deal through Comcast where they give you a token amount of capacity to use each month and then you're on your own.

I had nothing but problems with accessing Giganews, as did a lot of others I know. Occasionally I'll use the freebie I get with Giganews but I still see problems.

There's Newsguy, Supernews, among others. I've used Newsguy for awhile now and like them a lot. They have a variety of plans at good prices depending on how much you need to download. They have a nifty web interface and search engine too, or you can use a regular newsreader.

HeyNow

[George Shouse]

Do you subscribe to Giganews to get binaries or this list? If it is just for text based groups, check out

Shouse a fan of the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers It must be a Purple and Gold thing. Thanks for honoring the Original Lakers FAQs at

[Swingman]

Ran an nntp server in the early days of the net, switched to various ISP based servers in the intervening years until the MBA mentality made it non-feasible from a technical standpoint (no one left with the knowledge to run a news server), then tried various free, and pay, services. Giganews is the best of those I've tried thus far ... well worth the $12/month, IMO ... YMMV.

[Steven]

I'm a bit late jumping into this thread, but I've used newsguy.com for a number of years.

Membership cost is good compared to some of the other providers out there, and you get free email and website, along with newsgroups.

Steven

[Swingman]

I've heard they were good also. If I ever have problems with GigaNews I'll give them a try. IIRC, the archive on the wrec with GN was over 200,000 messages last time I refreshed ... way too many to download, in any event.

Top of my list of those to stay away from is Meganetnews ... from direct experience, the worse nntp serves on the net.

[WD]

You should try Supernews, extreemly fast, long retention, I believe they have something like 90,000 archives on rec.woodworking.

[Fred the Red Shirt]

Google works fine for me and the price is right.

If you want to download binaries, you need a real newsfeed.