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Are Public NNTP Servers a Thing of the Past? 63

Posted by Cliff from the the-extinction-of-another-free-network-service dept.
JPawloski asks: "When I bought this computer, it came with 6 months of AOL for free. Being notoriously frugal, I have used AOL and will continue to until my free time expires; however, the one disadvantage is it does not have a NNTP server. I find using Deja by Google cumbersome and have a number of problems (updating every 9 or so hours is one of them). I started a search of public NNTP servers on the Internet, and tried literally 50 of them, but none of them work. I even looked a directories of public news servers and fared no better. Are public news servers a thing of the past now that most ISPs offer it standard? Does anyone else out there still use a public news server, and, if so, how does it work compared to the alternatives (deja.com, etc.). Any other recommendations?"
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Are Public NNTP Servers a Thing of the Past? More

Are Public NNTP Servers a Thing of the Past?

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  • Bandwidth Abuse (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mr.Phil ( 128836 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @11:23AM (#3084150)
    I've found multiple public NNTP servers located at colleges and 4 year institutions that offer public read and write, but the majority of them don't offer access to alt.* groups. My opinion on this is because they can't afford the bandwidth abuse that comes from having alt.binaries.* open to the public. I know when I was running my NNTP server at the college I work for I was recieving 10GB daily of alt.* traffic, and that's with the head provider filtering some of the more "warez"ish groups.

    Depending on what you are looking for, multiple options exist, but I've yet to find a public access NNTP server with a full alt.* feed. Of course, most have rec.crafts.brewing, so I really don't go looking for anything in alt.*

    • Re:Bandwidth Abuse (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 )
      > I've yet to find a public access NNTP server with a full alt.* feed.

      You just haven't looked hard enough. There's an alt newsgroup about free newsservers (hint, hint) that you might want to investigate.

      There's a guy who works at an ISP. As an experiment, he's running one himself. The experiment consists of two servers, one for text (anyone can read, and you can post from it if you send him a polite email), and a read-only one for binaries (from which anyone can read, but it's frequently "busy", as he limits the number of simultaneous connections with the outside world.)

      His completeness and retention on binaries beats the hell out of most ISP-based servers.

      The result is that you can get most of your music from your own ISP (assuming you have an ISP that has a decent USENET feed), and use his public server for any missing parts. Fewer repost requests mean a lighter load.

      Incidentally, a full binaries feed is about 350GB per day. Holy fsck.

      • > I've yet to find a public access NNTP server with a full alt.* feed.

        You just haven't looked hard enough. There's an alt newsgroup about free newsservers (hint, hint) that you might want to investigate.

        The poor guy can't read alt.* groups, so you tell him to read an alt newsgroup...

        • > The poor guy can't read alt.* groups, so you tell him to read an alt newsgroup...

          *lol*

          But he can google for that newsgroup, and using what he learns there, can find the servers.

      • Christ, this sounds like it should be a "free USENET" appendix to Steal This Book.

  • Well, you can try this... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ayende Rahien ( 309542 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @11:25AM (#3084161)
    http://pubnews.netcom.net.uk/

    It requires a (free) registration, but it's quite good, it carries a good portion of the hirercy, and usually updates quickly enough.
    But on general, yes, free (of any good) NTTP services are *rare*.
    I'd to resort to using my ISP's NTTP service because of this, which is sub-optimal at best.
  • You said yourself that AOL doesn't. @Home put a limit on downloading once they declared bankruptcy. Comcast.net hasn't decided what its going to do, but suggested that if they do offer a news server, it will be limited. The only places that seem to have a news server are universities and commercial sites. With the heavy loads of all the binaries, it can't be cheap to run one.

    • Re:Not all ISPs offer them (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wholesomegrits ( 155981 ) <wholesomegrits@mch[ ]com ['si.' in gap]> on Thursday February 28, 2002 @01:35PM (#3085101)
      No, it isn't. I checked on installing a NNTP server at the university I work at. The find: for a full feed, it was a feed of over 40gig daily, spiking to 50-60 gig on the weekends. It was nearly two T1s worth of data 24/7, not to mention the disk space. Even with 200 gig of storage, that only gave a 3-5 day retention time. 3 days is pretty sparse. Such a feed almost requires two machines. One to process the incoming feed, and the other to handle clients. That further adds to the obscene cost. Most universities are not doing binaries anymore. We couldn't with out meager budget. Commercial sites are picking up the slack, and the trend seems to be for universities to purchase NNTP access in lieu of running their own.
      • What takes up all that space? I haven't spent much time on USENET the last few years, but it seems like a lot of the dicussion that used to be on USENET has moved to private mailing lists, Yahoo groups, etc.

        The vast majority of that 40GB has got to be warez and pictures. Imagine how many "make money fast" posts it takes to even reach a megabyte, much less a gigabyte.

        -Mark

      • So dump the alt.binaries groups. Two boxes with one used for client access is fairly standard (at least for busy sites). As for disk, once you lose the binaries groups, that 200G array should last you a bit longer.

      • It was nearly two T1s worth of data 24/7
        That's a fine way to express the bandwidth, but not many serious news servers (ones attempting to carry everything with good retention times) use land lines to get their feeds.

        Learn how to build your own satellite feed [infostar.de] like this one (with some stats) [c4systm.com]. Or peruse these links. [dmoz.org]

    • FWIW, it appears Comcast has decided to provide a giganews account for its subscribers. You have to "activate" the account, and it has a 1 Gb/month limit. So maybe I won't be in such a hurry to switch to another cable/ISP company...
    • actually commiecast.net...er, I mean comcast.net HAS put a cap on thier NNTP servers. a pitiful 1gb/month. And I thought that 3gb/month (or was it a week?) was bad. As I remember, they are "reselling" giganews.com access.

      If I could get DSL where I was, I would... but alas I am stuck (at least till my lease is up). Is it considered geeky to weigh the locations of apt communities heavily on distance from a central office?

  • There are quite a few... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @12:08PM (#3084528) Homepage
    ... some intentional, some not.

    Search Google for "public nntp servers" and you'll see many services that scan the 'net for such machines.

    http://www.newzbot.com is a good one.

    This thread [google.com] in misc.consumers.frugal-living (which I frequent) has several tips.

  • What we need is an easy to install NNTP server for Windows, with a built in client. Napster might be illegal, and gnutella might suck, but usenet is a tried and true method of distributing warez. And it's probably legal to run the server, to boot.

    • There are at least two (Score:2, Informative)

      by raindog2 ( 91790 )
      There are two that I know of for Windows: Hamster [t-online.de] (page is German), which is GPL'ed, and MyNews [winews.net], by the creator of yEnc, which is shareware and includes a built-in newsreader. There are probably more but those seem like the two dominant players in this very small field :)

      However, both of those are really oriented towards P2P more than what the poster was looking for. And I don't even want to think about what kind of smackdown would be waiting for a home broadband user running an open news server.
    • NNTP as a P2P protocol?

      Not workable. NNTP server relationships are not automatically established, so everyone who installed this NNTP server for Windows would have to find a news feed and convince the provider to add their new server to the list. Even if we extended NNTP with some sort of automatic feed-finding-and-registration system, there's still the problem that NNTP expects to deliver the entire feed to every server. I don't know about your connection, but that would destroy my DSL, and I'm only interested in a tiny fraction of what I'd be getting.

      And, as far as an easy-to-install NNTP client for Windows, well, how about MS Outlook?

  • Pay! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Per Wigren ( 5315 )
    I hate to say this, but you can pay for access to newsfeeds.com [newsfeeds.com]'s nntp-servers! I do, and it's worth every öre!
    I get superfast access to about 10 specialized nntp-servers and a total daily download-limit of almost 10GB!
    I have UBH [sourceforge.net] configured to automagically collect pr0n-videos from all of the newsservers and 600+ newsgroups. Then I have another script that creates thumbnails (using mplayer -vo png and imagemagick) and beautiful html-pages with all kind of info (size, length, codecs etc) and uploads everything to FreeNet [sourceforge.net] (Key not yet announced - still under development) :-)

    • Re:Pay! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
      ...configured to automagically collect pr0n-videos from all of the newsservers...

      ...beautiful html-pages with all kind of info (size, length, codecs etc)...

      Man, I must be getting old. The kids' language keeps changing. I mean, I can understand size and length in relation to porn stars, but what part of the anatomy does "codecs" refer to?

      (You can make it ugly by replacing the "d" with a "t"...)

  • Freenet.de (Score:2, Informative)

    by arunkv ( 116142 )
    Try news://newscache3.freenet.de/

  • Two free... (Score:4, Informative)

    by cymen ( 8178 ) <cymenvig.gmail@com> on Thursday February 28, 2002 @12:48PM (#3084781) Homepage
    1. Teranews.com [teranews.com] - 50mb/day for free but you have to enter a credit card number (they hope people will upgrade their accounts plus probably cuts down on abuse). They don't bill your credit card number nor automatically push you up into the next paying category so you don't have anything to worry about. I've been using them with the free account for a couple months and in general they are decent...

    2. news.cis.dfn.de [cis.dfn.de] - only text groups, was faster for me than teranews but I haven't used them for a while (forgot account info), have to wait to be approved but it doesn't take too long. So far I'd have to say this is the best deal all around...
    • If you're looking for text groups, don't bother trying Teranews. They have text groups on a separate server from binaries and do not service it reliably. Only the high volume users will become paying customers, so they only keep the porn flowing, not the valuable tech discussions.

      Been using new.cis.dfn.de for months now, after going a full week with no text articles through Teranews, and it has served me very well.

      • Well... I dunno... I use TeraNews.com for rec.photo.digital, some other rec.photo groups, and local groups. So far it has been much more reliable than my provider (who really stinks - DirecTvInternet, formerly Telocity, worst news server ever!). So far I've found completion to be pretty good... I haven't roamed into the binaries there so I can't comment on that.

        I agree that news.cis.dfn.de is really the best deal as no credit card, etc.. TeraNews.com was installing some new nntp software and I was locked out for a couple days.

        This reminds me to go signup again as I've definately lost my account details.

        [extended rant on my DSL providers nntp service]
        Actually DirecTvInternet doesn't have the worst ever news server(s) - it's just that they fired the one admin that:
        a. knew what the hell he was doing
        b. actually posted to the directv.* support groups
        For some reason DirecTvInternet has a corporate mandate against communicating with the customer. He was fired for communicated with us! Can you believe that? From posts in the directv.* groups I also know they have clueless tech support people (least at level 1 and getting higher is a pain). I've never dealt with them but I believe it...

        Why would such a company fire the people who communicate and keep the people who suck? It makes no sense from the customers viewpoint... Of course after the news admin left they tried to keep the one overloaded server still going by limiting the kb/sec to the server to near 56k modem speeds! Then they lowered the number of connections, throttled it after a coupe megs, tinkered some more, wiped the entire disks every couple weeks (really fucks up mozilla's newsreader), and put on a 250mb/day limit.

        Finally they seperated the text and binary groups but they still don't know how to properly expire the text groups as every couple of weeks they do a wipe and yet again mozilla shits bricks (it's thread sorting goes to hell, yes I filed a bug report but no response).

        Obviously it's not worth even trying to use their once good servers. It's a real shame...

        (oh, and if the former Telocity/directvinternet news admin reads this - thanks for the good work and I wish you didn't have idiots as bosses, you were the only who seemed to have a clue, I hope you found a great job with an ISP who cares)
    • Another resource is alt.free.newsservers [google.com]...

  • Not quite free (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @12:52PM (#3084807) Homepage
    But for about £2/month (yes, UK based) you can get a ClaraNews [claranews.com] account, which also gets you a ClaraNet email address (which are utterly rock solid an come with server side filtering) and basic dialup.

    They're not wonderful (if you're after binaries, they're more a suppliment than a primary feed, partly because they limit you to 256kbps, partly because retention isn't always great in such groups), but they're hard to beat for the price. They even have decent support.
  • Roadrunner supplies NNTP access, though in my area they only keep messages for three days (on average). Why don't you set up your own? Anyway, public news servers can be prone to abuse (ie spam) and might be blacklisted.

  • news.cis.dfn.de (Score:2, Informative)

    by Yumpee ( 32901 )
    news.cis.dfn.de works great for the non-binary newsgroups. Registration is mandatory and manual but free and quick. Great groups coverage and articles are retained for quite a while. I've been using it for a couple of months now, no complaints.

  • Free access? I wish. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Guru1 ( 521726 )
    Of course we can't expect companies / universities / people to run free access for the rest of the world to share. Look what happens when slashdot posts one link.. most independant web sites get slashdotted. What would happen if one site opened up access to all the newsgroups they had?

    No one company has the bandwidth to support the entire internet's access. Once places started closing their doors, it was a run for the hills. Just like most public services, if there aren't enough outlets to support the drain on resources, we overtax what we have and cause it to close down too. The only way to get access opened again on public servers would be to have a few really large companies open up.. that would be the only way to lower the drain on everyone.
  • pretty much. I think that you can find the news groups, but not sure if they are like they used to be. You have to realize that now with yahoo clubs / yahoo groups (becoming one by the way) and deja, the alt.xxx.xxx are fading away. The new groups are supposely easier to use when you learn them and also allow you to do things to reduce spam. I also think they give the companies running them more control, by having adult sections and things like that. The old alt groups and news groups did not have anything like that. What you probably need is a good news reader program. I think the only one that I can think of that you can use under windows is with netscape. There are others out there I'm sure. I know under Linux there are several.

    • Re:yes (Score:1)

      by Geeky ( 90998 )
      Free Agent is (was? haven't used it for a couple of years) a great Windows news client. Until Pan was usable under Linux, I used Free Agent with Wine in my Windows to Linux transition period.

    • The poster was looking for public news servers. That means he probably has a newsreader and is looking for a server he can at the very least read messages from (but since you can read posts @ groups.google.com, I think posting access is what he's looking for).

      All I can say is, RTFP!

      • If that is what the poster was looking for then AOL is not the ISP to join. Neither is MS.net or whatever M$ calls itself. Mindspring still has news.mindspring.com, but I think it is ONLY for mindspring users. I am accessing it NOW. Also some other ISP have news group access, but most are denying these services. Not sure why. I think they are not as accessed as they used to be.
        • If that is what the poster was looking for then AOL is not the ISP to join. Neither is MS.net or whatever M$ calls itself. Mindspring still has news.mindspring.com, but I think it is ONLY for mindspring users. I am accessing it NOW. Also some other ISP have news group access, but most are denying these services. Not sure why. I think they are not as accessed as they used to be.

          As has been pointed out in other posts, most ISPs have dropped at least the binaries because of the bandwidth that Usenet generates.

  • Usenet today (Score:5, Insightful)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Thursday February 28, 2002 @02:38PM (#3085620) Homepage Journal
    Actually ISPs are often dropping Usenet service these days.

    AT&T Broadband considered it a freebie and as it wasn't a specifically paid-for service didn't worry if it was messed up or down for awhile. Cox doesn't offer Usenet at all. Apparently the merged beast of the two will offer Usenet initially but with no promises (likely to become a tiered product.) This is pretty typical of much of the industry these days.

    Universities are also dropping Usenet; I got an announcement this week that Northeastern University will be discontinuing it and is referring folks to Google or other commercial services. Others are following the same path as copyright issues, costs, lack of academic relevance, and sheer volume become problematic - they're finding it easier to just offload the comparatively few users to custom services.

    Thus the two communities that were once most involved are moving away. Where once everyone at your typical ISP followed at least a few newsgroups or had fond memories of such now the staff is just as likely to say "like AOL chat?" and have no idea what you're talking about. Without those folks to champion it Usenet is seen as an odd step-child: Something used by warez-traders, porn freaks and whiners perpetually asking that so-and-so get dropped because they dissed the other. Without the free local access university students are also unlikely to become enamored of Usenet and request it of their ISPs in the future, contribute their free time (many of us recall the annual September deluge of newbies making the same mistakes year after year anew.)

    Further more with the opening up of online access the Global Village is becoming plagued with Village Idiots. Spammers are legion and have laid waste to many newsgroups. The socially maladjusted are increasingly hard to get dropped and their harrassment [slashdot.org] techniques are increasingly sophisticated. Much of the conversation has moved off to mailing lists, web-boards, and other richer-content/easily moderated venues.

    On an immediate scale the serving and servicing a full feed is increasingly expensive and becoming more so. The ISP-class software can be expensive, the hardware is a capitol cost, the users are generally the "top talkers" (most bandwidth hungry customers) of an ISP and thus among the least profitable under today's pricing models. With only a few percent of a ISPs customers even aware of Usenet it's an attractive cost-saving sacrifice for many.

    As to just Googling - that to me seems such a poor interface. They've done a good job of presentation but for following threads on an ongoing basis, setting filters, quoting and responding effectively a good news client is still worlds away better (ok - mebbe not Outlook Express, but about everything else is.) There are any number of good unix clients. Forte Agent on Wintel is decent, has a free version and is once again under active development. MT-Newswatcher is a brilliant variation of the venerable Newswatcher Mac client and has both MacOS & MacOS X version.

    For alternatives there are any number of commercial nntp feeds one can sign up for. Median price for a single user is around US$10/month and generally offers a generous though not unlimited transfer allowance. This could probably be shared amongst a few folks if someone were willing to set up the requisite hardware, software, and had the bandwidth. This of course also means administering the feed and funneling back up postings, doing one's own bit to not let spam in.

    Ironically one of the few bright spots of all this is Microsoft. Their support newsgroups have been a great success and are receiving ever-increasing amounts of support from within the company. Other vendors offer their own private news servers and groups but the best known generally is MS and it is bringing in a new set of users.

    Good luck.

    • Cox doesn't offer Usenet at all.

      As a Cox customer, I can say that's incorrect. They have news servers that are painfully slow, but reasonably complete with half-decent retention. They seem to be running their own servers with a lot of help from Usenetserver. You may have been thinking of Comcast, who originally announced they wouldn't be providing news until some unspecified point in the future, if at all. Whether it was public outcry or some other business reason, they recanted and outsourced to Giganews. For a measly 1 gig/month.

      In general, though, ISPs aren't dropping Usenet so much as outsourcing it. For less than what it cost them to run their own servers, poorly, they can outsource to a quality outfit like Supernews.
      • Cox doesn't offer Usenet at all.
        As a Cox customer, I can say that's incorrect. They have news servers that are painfully slow, but reasonably complete with half-decent retention. They seem to be running their own servers with a lot of help from Usenetserver. You may have been thinking of Comcast, who originally announced they wouldn't be providing news until some unspecified point in the future, if at all. Whether it was public outcry or some other business reason, they recanted and outsourced to Giganews. For a measly 1 gig/month.
        You're right, I rechecked my sources and one had Cox/Comcast confused, the other was out of date.

        On the other hand I'm hearing lots of rumblings that with tiered services Usenet will be an upper-tier option contracted or not. Pay $n per month and get a slow connection without a web page, pay $n+$10 and get Usenet, server space, open ports, etc. Or pay $n+$25 and get business class with a faster connection and all of the options.

        Silver, Gold, Platinum / Basic, Better, Business: Cable companies understand tiers and thier ISPs are adopting them, they'll drive the industry. Flat rate pricing with it's all-you-can-eat excesses will become a thing of the past.

    • University will be discontinuing it and is referring folks to Google or other commercial services.

      That seems reasonable to me. Google is fine for reading text groups, in fact I find it much better than using NNTP directly since often what I want to know is already in the groups FAQ, or might as well be as it gets asked so many times. If I have an obscure question, then I run the risk that the few people that might know the answer don't happen to read the group that day/week or it gets lost in the noise. Also, since I'm not posting, I'm not providing my email address to spammers.
      What Google needs to add is a posting facility for serious text based groups such as the comp.* hierarchy. They could put all the restriction on it they want, keeping posts to 500 characters, spam filters, pr0n filters, whatever, but buying Deja.com and profiting from the existence of USENET they must accept some responsibility to keep the medium alive.

      • What Google needs to add is a posting facility for serious text based groups such as the comp.* hierarchy. They could put all the restriction on it they want, keeping posts to 500 characters, spam filters, pr0n filters, whatever, but buying Deja.com and profiting from the existence of USENET they must accept some responsibility to keep the medium alive.

        They've got one. See the Posting FAQ [google.com].

    • Cept if you use Microsoft Internet Access your total usenet experience is pretty much limited to Microsoft support groups with little else available... At least on their server anyway.

      Better to find the last ISP that doesn't suck and get it that way, or end up spending $10-20 a month for it in addition to what you pay for the ISP.
  • www.teranews.com

    You have to sign up for an account and give an email address, but they've never spammed me.
  • There is a list at

    http://www.gj.net/~bhkraft/

    of "legal" freely accessible specialized/support/company usenet servers.

    Example:
    Users of the Opera browsers: news.opera.no
    Microsoft: msnews.microsoft.com
    Intel: intelforums.com
    Freshmeat: news.freshmeat.net

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