With news.swva.net gone, bburg.general and bburg.forsale have
disappeared from my list of subscriptions; and a search for bburg gets no
hits at all.
Va.general and va.forsale are still on the list, and "get all
headers" got nothing.
I'm thinking I need yet another server besides motzarella; got
any good ones??
Perhaps the "gold standard" is giganews, if you decide to go paid. They
aren't what one would call "cheap", but they put a lot of effort and
money into ensuring that their news service is the best connected
possible, and if giganews doesn't have the post, it's relatively safe to
say few servers beyond the one the original poster used to post the
message, got it. Giganews /does/ have some cheaper text-only accounts,
tho, I believe. That sounds like what you may be interested in.
Verizon used to subcontract to Giganews for its feed(s), and I
seem to recall once having some other provider that did, too. And
news.verizon.com used to have not only the bburg and va hierarchies, but
even the vatech one. And if memory serves, there were no limits.
The saving grace for you is that you've said you aren't particularly
interested in binaries. That means MUCH lower traffic, and
consequently, that you can knock off the expensive options right off the
bat.
Is there any easy way to get a handle on my traffic? If I can get
back to all the groups I want to follow, there'll be fifty or sixty of
them, ranging between ones I check at least once a day, and ones I don't
check even once a month. There'll also be some where I read almost
everything, and some where I delete 90% and up without reading.
Giganews's bottom ("jade") offer is 3 GB/mo, for $2.99 (which, I
*think*, is also per month).
Text-only also means that you're likely to be able to find a free server
that will work well for you if you try hard enough. Many folks like
motzarella, which comes well recommended as a free server tho I've never
tried it.
You seem to be telling me it is possible only to search provider
by provider for groups; not to search for a group and find out which
providers carry it. Right?
But, if you just want something that works and don't mind paying a bit,
for text-only, there's lots of paying options out there too. You can
get anything from block accounts, say 25 GB for $15 or $25 or some such,
which don't expire and should last a very long time (very likely over
two years for 25 GB on text-only), to the few dollars a month services
like giganews and others offer. As I mentioned, giganews has a
reputation as the gold-standard and for text you can likely get by with
their cheapest account, if you don't mind paying a bit to just get the
best and forget about it. Personally, I've never had a paid account
with them, but that's because I do binaries too on occasion (tho rarely
these days), and for binaries, while they are the gold standard, there's
cheaper and almost as good, which is where I've gone.
Are you saying you pay a flat fee, once, for a set number of GB,
and not again till you've used that up? All the plans at giganews.com
that I see today seem to charge per month. They also have a 10-day trial
period that's download-only -- you can't post. (I suppose you could
arrange to skip that, though they don't say how.)
Since all the gmane groups, for instance, will only be on the gmane
server, it'll only grab them from there. Same, I expect, with the grc
groups, etc, from the grc server only.
That's fer sartin shore. Steve Gibson is as close to the world
champion of computer defenses as any one person I know of.
This gets OT, but while I do respect his knowledge, he does have enough
of the salesman in him to be quite offensive to some. I do still
recommend him for MS users, but with the caveat that they take the self-
sales-pitch he offers with a rather large grain of salt. If people can
do that, he's a good source of security information. If they're
offended by the sales pitch or gullible enough to be taken in by it, for
them, there are probably better (less offensive and/or more neutral)
sources for the same info. But he has a VERY good way of being able to
break it down into the basics for the people that might not otherwise
get or understand the vital security info he teaches -- as long as you
aren't too offended or taken in by the self-sales-pitch at the same
time.