Steve B wrote:

Just thought that you might want to know that since Tuesday this
week, that if you use google-groups to access (read and post)
to usenet, that your posts haven't been leaving the google
server and hence all the rest of us that use REAL NNTP servers
haven't been seeing your posts.

where does that put us aioe users on the scale?

There's no scale here.

There continues to be real NNTP servers peered together in a world-wide
network, and there is Google with their pathetically inferior server
which provides a service branded as "google-groups" which for the past
week (the second time in the past month or two) has allowed users to
post messages but has not transmitted those messages to the outside
usenet world.

AIOE is one of many real NNTP servers. Posts made via AIOE or any other
real server continue to be propagated between each other - and also to
google's server. So google-group users will see those posts, but nobody
outside of google will see their posts.