[talk] usenet

[N.J. Thomas]

* assaf <Assafr at protonmail.com> [2018-01-30 18:38:54-0500]:
> Any thoughts on usenet providers (which to use or avoid) and services?
> Do any of you pay for the service? is it even possible to access
> usenet groups/servers for free? I am happy to pay for a if necessary.

Fascinating stuff. I abandoned netnews in the early 2000s, mostly due to
spam, and also because everyone else had moved onto web-based forums.
But I found out recently that comp.lang.awk is alive and well, which
makes me wonder if other comp.* newsgroups are active and if the spam
can be effectively filtered out.

As far as I can tell (disclaimer: this is based on only a few minutes of
web searching), if you are not looking for binaries, you can set up your
own nntp server and pull down only the stuff you want fairly easily. 

For the folks looking for binaries, there's a number of providers and
the metric that everyone judges these places by seem to be the monthly
cost and number of days they are retaining posts.

Thomas