On 31/10/2014 01:26, Arfa Daily wrote:


"Sam Plusnet" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...

Received this email form BT today:

Your Usenet service is changing

...

On 3 December, we're stopping the Usenet service that comes with your
broadband because our partnership with Giganews is coming to an end.
snip.

I do like the nice phrasing "Our partnership with Giganews is coming to
an end."

This translates as

"We're cheapskates, so we've decided to stop paying the bill.
If you still want it, go buy your own (but do use the link provided so
we can get a kick-back for the introduction)"



--
Sam


There are several groups that I 'subscribe' to including
uk.rec.cars.maintenance, this one, sci.electronics.repair and a few
others. Until fairly recently, all were very active groups. If you left
it a day before going back, there would always be a whole bunch of new
posts on each of them. But over the last six months or so, contributions
seem to have dropped to an all time low. A couple of weeks ago, there
was no new activity in terms of new threads, on any of them for several
days. It got to the point that I was beginning to wonder if my ISP's
usenet server was not doing regular updates, but it was. It was simply
that no one was posting. If this is becoming the general situation, then
I guess you can understand ISP's not wanting to keep paying third party
usenet server providers for a service that very few of their customers
are making use of. Although postings have now picked up a bit, they are
still well down on six months ago. This group is currently about the
busiest of the ones that I am involved with, but even on here, sometimes
there is only one or two new threads a day ... :-(

Arfa

If the demand has dropped that much, couldn't the ISP have renegotiated
their contract with the third party? A few subs to the Berlin server
would have been enough if the demand has fallen as far as you fear. :-(

One formerly busy group died quite a few years ago (still there
technically but more or less totally unused) due very largely to a
considerable number of foul-mouthed, nasty posts and volume of spam. The
group dispersed while those posts were appearing and found other places.
Very sad. (Berlin server always managed to reduce the spam considerably
but others saw far, far more.)

--
Rod