[Access to Usenet]

I am accessing usenet, posting on and reading newsgroups since around
1996. Which does not mean a lot, as you can do an arbitrary amount of
bungling during your “35 years” of experience in any job. But I have
made observations and even got to understanding “technology”.

The (declared) ability and (declared) determination of any service to
render your experience with their use of a *well-defined technology*
more comfortable should not influence your decision to pay them or not.
The technology in this case is usenet or the uses of the nntp-protocol,
more exactly (anyone still on uucp ? Thanks. Thought so.)

I am using several open and free news-services (branching to an
arbitrary number of news-servers) simultaneously:

open-news-network
netfront
aioe
solani
eternal-september

Anything which is not open-news-network just adds content in case that
the previous cannot. If they work and provide me with news-articles, any
one of these services does the *same job*.

The fact that some more or less eagerly respond to complaints about
their users “spamming” or “trolling” decides about their position in my
list but not more.

If there still are trollposts to handle, filtering is done by me alone
as I deem nobody else capable to decide in my place what I consider spam
or trolling. I won't explain all of this in detail, as, in addition, I
am not familiar with Windows, these days and wishing to control your own
machine appears to become unpopular with today's Internet-users.

I only say, that the simple use of free and open news-services creates
no problem, nor does it AFAIS and a priori impose constraints for my
access to nntp-newsgroups.

My former internet access-providers gave me Usenet-access and all have
stopped to do so. All of these services were flawed in one way or other.
I appreciate, that nowadays, the best Usenet-services are offered by
people who really *want* to do the job rather than add Usenet as a
gimmick to their produce.

I cannot say all that in fewer words. Sorry.

;-) Michael (Kraut-Frog)

--
Location: Lower Normandy (Orne), France
GnuPG/OpenPGP 4096R/3216CF02 2013-11-15 [expires: 2015-11-15]
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