test

--
Regards
John Lawrence
"Life is like a sewer--you get out of it, what you put in."

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:48:47 GMT, "John Lawrence"
wrote:

test

Oh good. Are you testing because you haven't got any new messages for
hours? I called Aliant tec support in NB and they wanted to know
what a newsgroup was. g

I get any messages I post, but yours is the first I've seen other that
that.

Glad to know that there are other people alive in the world. Thanks for the
reply.
wrote in message
news
On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:48:47 GMT, "John Lawrence"
wrote:

test

Oh good. Are you testing because you haven't got any new messages for
hours? I called Aliant tec support in NB and they wanted to know
what a newsgroup was. g

I get any messages I post, but yours is the first I've seen other that
that.

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 22:49:42 GMT, "John Lawrence"
wrote:

Glad to know that there are other people alive in the world. Thanks for the
reply.
wrote in message
news
On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:48:47 GMT, "John Lawrence"
wrote:

test

Oh good. Are you testing because you haven't got any new messages for
hours? I called Aliant tec support in NB and they wanted to know
what a newsgroup was. g

I get any messages I post, but yours is the first I've seen other that
that.


I'm going to call Aliant again and tell them it isn't just me.

Chris

I'm in and new to goog grps.........can you explain the distaste for
it?........Steve
Paul wrote:
In article , wrote:

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 22:49:42 GMT, "John Lawrence"
wrote:

Glad to know that there are other people alive in the world. Thanks for the
reply.
wrote in message
news On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:48:47 GMT, "John Lawrence"
wrote:

test

Oh good. Are you testing because you haven't got any new messages for
hours? I called Aliant tec support in NB and they wanted to know
what a newsgroup was. g

I get any messages I post, but yours is the first I've seen other that
that.


I'm going to call Aliant again and tell them it isn't just me.

Chris

I just happened to catch this thread in a Google search. While
I was trying to repair my USENET service...

You guys don't know what's up, and Aliant/Sympatico have been
real sneaky in announcing their latest changes.

A few days back, you may have received some of those irritating
HTML emails from your ISP. Telling you about changes to your terms
of service or something. You look at the documents, and notice
nothing in particular that is different enough to care about.

Then you are told that your bill for high speed service is going
up by $2. (My response - I cancelled everything except basic
phone service on my voice line.)

Then, a few days later, you are using your Sympatico USENET server
and every news group on the server has one last message as the
last entry in the group. It tells you that USENET services have
been discontinued. The message text points you to this web page:

http://bell.newshosting.com/bell/home.php

Basically, in Ontario, they have discontinued the Bell
news servers. They offer a USENET service on another provider,
where you have _no posting privileges_ . The import of this
is ominous. They have removed a service you used to have,
and replaced it with no service at all.

As an Ontario Sympatico user, I happened to know about the
sister operation at Aliant. Our news servers would go down
(even the redundant ones), when there were problems with some
other Microsoft networking infrastructure. (I correlated the
failures, with other failures people observed on some private
forums, and that is how I concluded that the Sympatico/Microsoft
alliance was the underlying problem.) As a result, I moved
to the Aliant news server, and it appears that my network
address was accepted by the server as a valid user. I've
been using the Aliant server for some time.

So a few days ago, they basically turned off the news servers
in Ontario. I continued to use the Aliant news server until
yesterday. I noticed no new messages after 3AM in the morning,
which would be the normal time to reboot the server. In other
words, at 3AM Aliant turned on a policy change, which was basically
to disconnect the feed from the outside world. I didn't need
to phone anyone to reach this conclusion. I'm used to being
kicked around as a customer and treated as dirt, so have to do
the best I can on my own. They didn't even bother posting the
courtesy message, announcing it was shut, like they did in
Ontario.

So, like me, your choices are - pay your existing high
internet service price, then spend additional money on
a separate news server. Or use a free news server. The
first free news server I was using earlier this evening,
is no longer responding, so I've had to switch to another
one. And I don't plan on using Google Groups, as some
USENET participants have killfiled all Google postings,
so if you use Google you'll be in a network ghetto.

I hope this has been of some help. Good luck with your
next USENET provider...

Paul