Re: Are my posts getting through?

On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:54:19 +0000, Jon Purkey wrote:

On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:07:39 -0600, coigner
<coignerATgmail@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:19:41 -0800, Honus wrote:

"coigner" <coignerATgmail@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:sq2dnaPWrtAkEcjanZ2dnUVZ_jmdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

<snip>

There's also these folks:

http://individual.net/

Who used to be just an open, free to use server at a German
university but had to start charging when droves of people showed up
at their door. Still, they're pretty cheap at 10 EUR per year
(that's... $14 or $15 right now, somewhere in that area). No binaries
but if you just want to get to text groups, they're a good service.
I've recommended them to a lot of people and they've all been happy
with them.

--
http://myworld.ebay.com/coigner

Thanks for the tip. I'd like to be able to get binaries. I've never
been able to see any of the coins posted to the numismatic binary
newsgroup, the real name of which eludes me for the moment. But I've
lived this long without it, so....

Well, if you have some kind of Usenet service through your ISP, you'd
still have access to it though it may be flaky. And you're not the first
person I've seen complaining about Comcast. They don't appear to really
care about Usenet access and I suspect they don't put much effort into
it.

So maybe having Individual.net would at least give you a reliable
connection to text groups like this one and at least if Comcast gets
flaky, you're not just totally cut off?


Most ISPs probably feel (or know from their logs) that the majority of
their customers just use Google for groups. I can understand them not
wanting to maintain a news server for the small percentage of customers
that would want it. Smaller and mid-sized ISPs may be more likely to do
it as they target the niche market.

Actually, I can't understand not maintaining Usenet access. Even if it's
only a fraction of your users, they're still paying customers. And the
bigger you are, the bigger that fraction will be numerically.

Further, it's cheaper in relative terms for a big ISP to provide Usenet
access than a small one. A full IHAVE feed is pricey. Last I looked, you
were talking about $1200 a month best case (I think that was a full 3GB
feed). A big company could afford that more easily.

And Usenet is now so old and "set in its ways" that maintaining a server
isn't a big job. The "heavy lifting" is the abuse department and that
won't change whether you have your own server or not. You still have to
(okay, you're *supposed* to) enforce your terms of service no matter what
Usenet access your user is using.

If anything, having your own "in house" makes enforcement easier. You
can, for instance, bounce a user from Usenet access (or even single
Usenet groups) without cutting their entire account. If you dump it all
on Google, your only enforcement is shutting their account down.

(This means you end up either becoming a spam and abuse source, which a
number of ISPs have done, because you don't want to cancel the account
and lose the cash or your enforcement becomes pretty "heavy handed". I
don't see the advantage here.)

Further, Supernews and Giganews both do contracts where *they* do all the
work. One of the reasons I ended up on Giganews is because that's who I
had with my previous ISP. Since the service worked pretty well, I picked
up an individual account when I moved (out here into the woods where I'm
stuck with satellite access and no Usenet service provided at all).

So contract it out, let Giga or Super do the work, and buy just as much
Usenet as you need for whatever percentage of users want it. My previous
DSL provider was *not* one of the "big guys" and that's what they did.
Surely Comcast (et al) could afford it?

I used individual.net when it was free and found it to be very reliable,
though not as good as with a previous ISP that used giganews.

Yeah, Giga's good. Super is nice (and I liked their abuse department,
very professional folks) but Giga seems to have them beat on retention
and speed. At least for now.

Now I have
Verizon which has an OK news server, provided I open up enough
connections to get decent speed. Though even with 8 connections running
I sometimes don't get my full 5 Mbits. Luckily I don't do a lot of
binary downloads.

5 what?

No, no, I don't wanna hear it. Not when I'm stuck paying through the nose
for a high latency, gee I hope it'll hit 1 meg today, connection.

(I have to keep telling myself, "fast connections are in *cities*, do you
want high speed Internet or trees?" <g>)

--
http://myworld.ebay.com/coigner
.

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