Custos Custodum writes:

On Fri, 25 Jan 2019 11:43:05 +0000, Scott
wrote:

On Fri, 25 Jan 2019 11:04:15 GMT, Harry Bloomfield
wrote:

The reader80.eternal-september.org seems to have been completely
inaccessible now, since around the 18th. Have they switched it off
permanently?

I cannot understand why anyone is still using this provider. Too mean
to pay 10 Euro per year? That's probably less than a cup of coffee
every three months. As my granny used to say, you get what you pay
for!

If you are lucky. For me, Usenet is purely a recreational/displacement
activity. On the rare occasions that there are problems with ES, I
simply find something else to do. The real mystery is why anyone would
want to use Google Groups, except as a last resort, when there are
free news providers and news clients out there which don't mangle your
formatting as GG does, and thread messages properly, which GG doesn't.

These reasons may fall into your "last resort" category:

1 An ISP, employer or institutional network blocking the
customary ports.

2 Using a public access, borrowed, or old device where you can't
install software more capable than a web browser, or indeed any
software.

3 A quick and dirty read-only check for new postings on a second
screen while composing a new post. (Seeing posts in time order
rather than threaded is almost helpful in this usage.)

That said, I agree that GG is a pain for anything other than the
shortest post, especially in the mobile (as opposed to desktop)
versions.

As a workaround, I request the desktop site, hit Reply in GG,
copy quoted text to an external editor and do everything there,
before pasting the result back into GG to post. It can be painful
and error prone but it works, mostly

--
David