Anyone else having trouble with news.individual.net? I haven't been able to get onto their news server all day, and their website is giving me server not found. I know a few on here use this. First problem I have ever had with them that wasn't my fault.
On or around Mon, 9 Apr 2007 10:39:39 +0100, "Rich B" enlightened us thusly:
seemed to be a glitch. I had similar, and later it worked OK again. Gremlins in the interweb.
I've also got an account on gazeta, which is a Polish free access one - you need to sign up and the instructions are in Polish, but apart from that it's a useful backup.
Funny how so many have had to renew at the same time. Yep, I missed their reminders (complicated story) and had to give their payment service a new CC number, but this was several days later. Anyway, it seems to be back up now.
Not all ISPs offer news services any more, and those that do sometimes c*ck them up. I am with Mailbox who used to offer a very good news service but when they were bought out it all went downhill. I bought news.individual.net access for £6 a year (!) as a backup.
You can of course use google groups but it's not the same thing at all, web access to usenet stinks.
On or around Tue, 10 Apr 2007 07:00:46 GMT, "Julian" enlightened us thusly:
I gave up using ISP ones when Telinco were bought out and the quality of service went down. I started using what was then cis.dfn, which then became individual, and I can count the failures on the fingers of one hand after several years. It was started as a university project to run a news server and as such was funded from somewhere for the first several years, then that funding dried up and they started charging to support it, but frankly, 10 euros a year is peanuts and I'm happy to pay it for the quality of service that results.
Frequently the only time I get to see a spam post is when someone else quotes it. Or when someone attempts to flood a group with postings only first few hundred get through if I'm unlucky. More often than not I don't get to see them either. Oh and it's fast, I "blink" to the server postings go first then I download, my posting will come back in that download.
new.individual.net is dirt cheap as a paid-for service, and excellent value.
Unfortunately, my ISP seems to block _all_ NNTP access at busy times, even to their own crap server, and I've not had much luck at getting them to explain what is happening.
Demon, when I was a customer, was pretty good, but n.i.n (well, its free predecessor in those days) was a very effective backup. I was sometimes getting a faster connection to Germany than to Demon's own server.
n.i.n doesn't carry binaries, which may explain some of the apparent speed. The traffic in binaries newsgroups is huge, still, even in these days of P2P, and that may explain why my ISP blocks NNTP as well as P2P.
It is, I find, well worth knowing how to use telnet to open a connection to port 119--if a news server is working you will get a response, and that test is still available in Windows XP (open a DOS window and type "telnet news.individual.net 119"). I do some even geekier stuff that way.
When they tell you how to reinstall Outlook Express, it gets you only bafflement when you point out that it isn't RFC 1149 compatible.
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