AT&T Cancelling Usenet

Lots of ISPs have done so. When posting about a Ridge, I realized I we hadn't heard from Ed Rasimus in a while, and emailed him. He's mainly stopped posting due to that (he's well by the way).

Choices include google groups, motzarella (though I just got notice they're doing a switch, haven't closely read yet), etc

Dale, Isn't this effectively sounding the death knell of usenets?

This has been happening worldwide. It doesn't mean the end of usenet groups due to the manner in which Google has taken over the Deja archives as Google Groups &c.

For those who find the noise on Google Groups too much, there are free usenet servers and also some subscription ones. Many UK ISPs don't offer Usenet and when mine did I transferred over to

This is a German server based at the Free University of Berlin and costs EUR 10 per annum. I've never had any problems with it. It has far less spam than in Google Groups.

A list of free and commercial servers can be found at

James

Hey, Peter, funny seeing your name here. No, "Usenet" newsgroups predate most ISPs and may very well outlive most of the current ones. What will happen is that those people who care about such things will transition to pay services such as Giganews, Highwinds or Supernews, or to free newservers. Here's a short list of those latter, since they all carry text groups like alt.food.wine:

nntp.aioe.org news.eternal-september.org (the successor to Motzarella) drooper.mixmin.net news.individual.net news.x-privat.org

For more details, see:

HTH Mark Lipton

No longer free, but very reasonably priced, and gives a good service. I've been with them for quite a few years, starting when my ISPs newservers went through a bad patch of unreliability. No binaries I believe, but that does not bother me.

I have ATT/Yahoo DSL Elite DSL service, and was not even aware ATT still supported Usenet groups. MSN quit many years ago as well as well as AOL and many others. Now Google groups takes up much of the slack and is free and quite easy to use. For diehard admirers of Usenet, there are several free and pay news servers that will let you configure download of Usenet groups in minute detail. I wish the whole Usenet group structure would be discarded, as it is a relic of the old days even before there were isps. The speed of service is now so great and many computers are on all of the time, so I see little point in downloading Usenet or many other groups to my computer. Why would one even want to configure Usenet posts to lock out seeing posts from someone, from some isp etc? This reminds me of the ostrich sticking his/her head in the sand when a lion approaches. Just because you can not see it does not mean it is not there. If a group has too many posts useless to me, I usually move on to another group. Then there are the spam and troll problems, etc on Usenet. I find that many of the younger generation have little use for Usenet and are much more at home posting at a php bulletin board. One can easily ban posters that troll and post gross spam. One can delete posts that are untrue. If this is overdone, some members are likely to migrate somewhere else or start their own PHP BB. It is so easy to set up a PHP BB now. I likely could set up a group within a short time as templates are in place on the server I use. However, I do not have the time or patience to manage any sort of group.

In article , Steve Slatcher writes

I also switched to them about a year ago, and agree with others that they seem reliable and reasonably priced.

Only if you stop using them.

Down with AT&T... boycott!

Mark,

I like to peek in on newsnet periodically but I really don't have time to start trying to make special arrangements.

It is sad what is happening to old-time venues e.g. Compuserve, newsnet, etc.

. . . . . Pete

Well, Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL got caught by developments beyond their control (and business model) but newsgroups soldier on. In many ways, it's a return to a bygone era when only the cognoscenti knew how to access them. FWIW, since it looks like you use SeaMonkey, reconfiguring it to use a new server for newsgroups is about a 5 minute process.

Mark Lipton

All you have to do to read posts for this group is go to

Mark,

If you provide me access to an easy and free method of using SeaMonkey to access newsgroups with a new server, I will look into it.

I'm not lazy, but neither am I anxious to spend a lot of time/effort to start reconfiguring my PCs.

. . . . Pete

Perfectly reasonable, Pete. Here's a step-by-step guide to setting SeaMonkey's newsserver settings, courtesy of the folks at individual.net:

Of course, you can put *any* server name in there, not just their example of news.individual.net. Personally, I use news.aioe.org since my ISP was purchased by Comcast. No registration required, posting OK, good uptime and reliability. Some of those others are also good, though.

Mark Lipton

Get DSL Extreme. Great ISP and still have newsgroup access!