" wrote:

I'm not sure why anyone reading usenet text groups would want
to use a paid service vs any of the many free servers that
currently exist (such as the one I've been using for the
past 4 years - aioe.org).

Because a lot of people block aioe completely.

Which is paradoxical, since aioe goes overboard to ban all local-users
from posting to groups from which the aioe administrator has received
pretty much any form of abuse complaint.

At any given time, there are dozens of groups which aioe does not permit
local users from posting to, and which local users discover this "ban"
because their posting software given them an error when they attempt the
post. And aioe does not make it known which groups are banned, or when
the ban was put in place. It does remove the ban at the request of
users, but only if a suitable ban-period has elapsed, but the length of
this period is not known to users.

And I'm not aware of any organized or widespread habbit of kill-filing
AIOE posters, at least not like there is supposed to be for google-group
posters.