Are you pleased with Earthlink service? I had them years ago on dialup, and the service was terrible. Giganews as their usenet feed would be great, so maybe it is time to look at changing ISP's again. My current Comcast ISP high speed rate is $45 plus I pay $10/month to Easynews for
25gigs/month of Usenet, a lot of which I never use. I've got over 500 gigs banked. Comcast terminates service if you use over 250 gigs in a month.
---------------------------------- SFWIW:
Like you I had E/L on dial-up for years and saw service deteriorate dramatically.
Switched to Verizon on line package which also includes unlimited phone (local & LD) a couple of years ago and other than loss of binaries which Astraweb replaced, have been quite happy.
When needed, online service has been prompt and has resolved any problems quickly.
My package does not include cell or TV service.
YMMV
Lew
Same setup I have.
When RoadRunner stranded me, they provided newsgroup access through another provider, newshosting. Check with your local RR office -- see if you have the same access. The catch here is that you must access this provider from your home IP address -- tough luck for the road warriors.
Yeah, RoadRunner kinda sucks, but so do most of these de facto monopolies. Anyboody using AT&T's U-verse? That's my only other realistic option, but the sales people had no clue what "usenet" was.
Verizon only dumped the binaries in your area? In New York about a year ago the decided to carry only the "Big 8" news groups. A few months ago Verizon decided to dump news groups altogether.
I signed up for Astraweb when they dumped all newsgroups.
------------------------------ It's been so long since I installed Astraweb, forgot that I use it for ALL Usenet groups.
Sorry for any confusion; however, comments about Verizon service still stand.
Lew
At one time u-Verse customers were indeed allowed access SBCGlobal's nntp servers, although I understand the retention time was so short as to be not worth the effort.
Don't know if they still allow access, or if anyone at u-verse can even spell nntp these days, but you may be able to ask here:
Besides that the "outside" boards might embarrass you by correcting your spelling. And some tend to snip posts and that just sucks.
Max (let it all hang out)
On 1/25/2010 6:10 AM Jeff P. spake thus:
Well, thanks for the offer (really), but you know what they say: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:05:51 -0600, the infamous snipped-for-privacy@wi.rr.com scrawled the following:
I remember you, Jeff. I just came back after a hiatus, too. Are you back to harass the locals like I am? Great!
What, you don't like maturity?
I might stop by, but the Wreck is the place for me. I still love Usenet, despite the asshole trolls and the idiots who respond to them daily. I filter maybe 65% of the bloody messages, but you can't geet the diversity of opinion or breadth of wisdom on a local board that you can here.
On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:59:36 -0500, the infamous Ed Pawlowski scrawled the following:
Precisely. Why don't message boards mimic the known efficiency of Usenet on a local server, fer chrissake? They're all so bloody slow and redundant. I haven't seen one yet where you could simply jump from one message to the next without going back to the forum and looking at the next subject, etc. Ghastly slow.
On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:21:49 -0600, the infamous "Leon" scrawled the following:
If you're cheap, Giganews is $3 to sign up and free for use. Slow as hell, hard to get on during whatever happens to be the daily rush hour, but accessible otherwise.
SBC dropped news groups a year or two ago.
Mike > >
If you are that easily embarassed, or even worry about such things, maybe usenet is the wrong place for you.
Can you point me to the free after sign up information? I have been using Giganews for several months now and pay $3 monthly. And I have not noticed any thing slow...
Acutally I was using SBC news groups till March last year. Perhaps that was in your area.
Whooosh!! LOL
Max (wouldn't miss it for anything)
Well, you missed it this time.
There was no "whooosh"
Been using Giganews for six years and have always been more than happy with the service (also was a sysadmin for two nnttp servers in a previous life, so appreciate the nuances of same and the way they do their business.).
I do point Thunderbird to an ip address instead of "news.giganews.com", so I don't have to deal with DNS issues, which some ISP's (like my u-Verse home connection) seem to be having difficulty with lately. Might want to try that and see if it helps.
In this case: 216.196.97.131 ...( which you may not see if you do an nslookup since they do round robin).
Danger, of course, is if they change ip addresses in their zone file you can't connect. So far that has never happened, but if so, simply go back to the server name.
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