A lot of us have given up on ISP news service and gone to a third-party
provider. I use newsguy.com, a lot of folks use individual.net, which used
to be free and is now cheap, some folks I know have started using
free.teranews.com, which has restricted bandwidth (50 MB/day, plenty for
text but not so good for binaries) but is free.

Newsguy is carrying over 43,000 newsgroups at the moment, not sure about
the other two.  Individual.net doesn't carry binary groups, Teranews
claims to carry _all_ groups but doesn't give a number.

Most if not all ISP's have or are going to drop newsfeeds - why escapes
me, as they are getting paid by subscribers who signed up when newsfeeds
were part of the deal.  My own ISP just up and dropped news with about a
weeks warning, but no reduction in the charges, so it amounts to a
reduction in service with no commensurate fee drop.

I surfed around and found teranews with their free 50MB daily, which I
can live with quite well, and if somebody wants more than that you can
subscribe a few dollars monthly for greater access.  My news client does
not tell me how many groups there are.

I think the gradual tightening up and reduction in the numbers of groups
available is due at least in part to increasing pressure on
pornographic, particularly child and teen porn groups, which are being
closed down for fear of prosecution - witness the government in USA
attempting to get access to Google and other sites for the purpose of
finding people who search for illegal images.

Other groups probably just fade away for lack of posters.  Of the tens
of thousands of groups available, only a comparative handful are really
active.

Colin D

There aren't even 40,000 newsgroups.  The rest are just bogus, misspelled,
or total nonsense.

Don't be fooled by marketing nonsense.  Some providers put a load of crap
into their group lists just so they can cite a larger number than the
other guy -- and you end up having to wade through the crap to get to the
actual, active groups.

NOBODY uses their ISP news anymore, they subscribe to an independent.

I use Forte's news server, it costs only $6 a month for 20 G bytes! And it has
hundreds of thousands of groups.

And they keep messages a long time... EG the oldest in this group right now is
July 2005 !

Also, if you like movies and mp3s, almost all multi-part messages are intact.

The other day I clicked on a vintage movie group and it said "980,000 new
messages".  I clicked cancel 'cause that would take 10 minutes!

My ISP dropped their newsgroup server about a year ago.  I think I was
the only one using it.  I now subscribe to supernews.  Of the 29,000+
groups, I only look at 4 groups so number of groups was irrelevant to
me.  I was more concerned about quality of service from my provider.  I
kept receiving the same post multiple times from the first provider I
tried - they were unable to fix the problem.  Since then I've switched
to supernews with no problems.  For me I worry about quality not
quantity.  Who has time to read 51,000 news groups?  ... unless you are
into spamming.

AFAIK, google groups carries all newsgroups, and it is free too.

Videotron (Cable, 2, 5 and 20 Mbit/sec options) just stopped adding new
ones as of a couple years ago (including this one).  So they keep
servicing older ones that inlclude binaries (phots, video, music, etc.)
but they refuse to add text only NG's such as this one.  (So I log onto
this one via a foreign ISP).

There are commercial NG services for a few $ / month such as Newsguy,
Giganews and so on.

Cheers,
Alan

I have found ISPs restrict Newsgroup functionality. As a Mac user I
find a dedicated newsgroup provider such as Powerusenet (powerusenet
.com) or panic.com (a Supernews reseller) together with what I believe
is the best newsgroup client for the Mac, Unison by Panic is the best
solution for me.
I have Charter Cable out here in California and have also been a long
time Earthlink user and find that neither of these can give what a
dedicated Usenet/Newsgroup server can.
I also have to agree with other posters, that quantity does not always
provide a satisfying experience. Finding the groups I enjoy
participating with is more than enough for me. There is not enough time
in the day to sort out all the crap.

On Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:52:44 -0500, Alan said...

Saw Newsguy mentioned a few times and for what it's worth I've also used them
for many years. I get newsgroups, email and webspace through them for about $3
month and haven't had any significant problems.

Newsgroup counts can be deceptive and you'll find that dedicated newsgroup
providers & ISP news servers will vary on that point. 120,000 and 40,000 may
look like a big gap but when you take a look at the additional groups most of
them are fake, empty or spam dumps so there isn't much use for them.

Most providers take care with the newsgroups they add to their sites and if they
miss something you can usually request it and they'll add it.

For me there are more important considerations when hooking up with a provider
such as completeness of their feed, propagation and cost to name a few. ISP news
servers are notoriously unreliable unless they're outsourcing to a premium
newsgroup service so you're usually better off going with a dedicated provider
in the long run.

vin

I use Giganews and would highly racommend them. I have loaded text
post as far back as 2003 on them, and if you are into binaries they
have something ike a 45 day retention. I have used them for years, and
have never been anything but happy with them.

I have also used Supernews, and was happy with them as well. But went
with Giganews do to the longer retention rate.