News.btinternet.com

As BT is not renewing its contract with Usenet.
BT is asking individual customers to take up contract
with Usenet any News services.
Does this mean that it is the end of these groups?

AAH wrote:
As BT is not renewing its contract with Usenet.
BT is asking individual customers to take up contract
with Usenet any News services.
Does this mean that it is the end of these groups?

Look at the headers of the messages, to see where they
come from.

My messages are carried by eternal-september.

http://www.eternal-september.org/Reg...hp?language=en

Another server is AIOE, which requires no registration.

http://www.aioe.org/index.php?home

Each of the servers has some level of instructions on
how to get connected.

*******

When you post, your message is relayed from server to
server, until all of them have a copy. The servers are
"peers" of equal standing. The disconnection of any one
peer, doesn't stop all the rest from functioning. For
example, eternal-september probably has direct logical
connections to seventy other servers. And indirect connections
to the rest.
AAH
/
|
aioe ------- giganews ----- eternal-september
\ | /
+--------google -----+

AAH moves the connection to another server, and everything
still works.

Now, a difference in the service, is what newsgroups are
carried. Giganews would include binary groups carrying
movie downloads. The users connected to Giganews might
download 200GB per month from the server (as 40 DVDs).
Whereas a server like AIOE carries just text groups. You can
send a dozen messages a day to AIOE, which means in a year
long period, the data traffic will not be GB but will be
MB or KB. Since the service is free, and the operator
pays for the bandwidth out of his own pocket, you cannot
expect the operator to provide a movie download service.
And that's why the high-volume binary newsgroups are
not offered on the free servers.

You can get an account with a "pay server", if you want
to continue downloading the movies that get posted.

And even though Microsoft has disconnected their news *server*,
the news *groups* continue to be carried on all the servers.

There are coordination mechanisms between INN servers,
in the form of control messages. To make this group
disappear from all the servers, an "rmgroup" message
would need to be sent. No message of that kind was
sent officially by Microsoft. So the administrators
of most of the servers, just left the group in place.

There have been other groups that were removed everywhere,
such as some mozilla.* groups and something with
adobe.* in the name. So the groups list does change
over time, and there are various ways of asking for
groups to be added. For example, alt.comp.os.windows-10
group is available on a number of servers, but is not
going to be offered by all of them - that group
is not likely to be carried on Google (groups.google.com).
There are other OS groups, such as alt.windows7.general,
alt.comp.os.windows-8 and
microsoft.public.windows.vista.general . So if you have
a Windows question, there's always somewhere to post it.

Paul