On Aug 1, 7:31*pm, Michael Koblic wrote:
My *&%@#$&^* ISP dropped newsgroups today without any warning.
I am on through Motzarella but I wonder: What do others use? What do you
consider the best way to access newgroups? What do you get if you pay
vs. for free?

Thanks,

crquack

You've gotten some good pointers but nobody has addressed what you get
for your money. Retention is what you really are paying for, freebie
outfits usually allocate the minimum size for lesser-used groups.
You're paying for the terabytes of storage space and redundancy. First
post in is the first erased. Some of the pay news services can keep
posts for several months in the binaries groups, I've had them from a
year or more back in text groups. If you suddenly find a group you're
interested in, you can get all available posts, should you want them.
So you could pick up on a long-running discussion and figure out what
the heck started it all off. And the pay services are almost never
down due to disk or server issues.

The Agent newsreader has a trial offer combined with Forte's news
service, you get full unlimited access for a trial period, the
continuation fee isn't a whole lot per month and it isn't automatic.
You HAVE to tell them you want to continue, otherwise it gets shut off
at the end of the trial period. Try before you buy.

With most pay news services, you can download the list of groups they
subscribe to prior to signing up. One reason I have a newsguy account
was that they carry some of the lesser-accessed groups that nobody
else bothers with. The current Agent program will let you run against
multiple news servers, if a binary post is botched on one server,
it'll automatically fill the busted parts in from another.

Stan