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I very recently have been accepted as the moderator of an abandoned, moderated group. As such, I needed to find a Usenet provider who would accept posting into
by BixbyUsenet 3y ago
I very recently have been accepted as the moderator of an abandoned, moderated group.
As such, I needed to find a Usenet provider who would accept posting into moderated groups, from a moderator.
I originally contacted Eternal September, and Wolfgang informed me my account had been configured to allow such posting, but it does not work ("account not authorized") and now he does not respond to email.
I then contacted four commercial providers, all of whom did not know about moderated groups, and either failed to respond in a timely manner (a week) or failed to grasp the concept of moderated groups;
1. Giganews
2. Tweaknews
3. Eweka
4. Usenetserver
Giganews first line support did not know about moderated news-groups. I explained, and once the support staffer understood, a support ticket was created. Giganews claim a few hours response time. When asked about this, they then say up to three days. After seven days, I cancelled the support ticket.
Tweakness, Eweka and Usenetserver I think are in fact the same company. I could be completely wrong, but they all use the same support software, have the same options in the drop down lists on their sites, and so on.
All did not know about moderated news-groups, and all were unable to grasp the concept, and all then went into that failure mode, where support is giving the wrong answers to questions, not paying attention to what is written, not reading the history of communication, and so finally going into a loop which consisted of them telling me "you need an account to post" (where they meant posting normally - not as a moderator), which they had said before, and which I had replied to before (explaining again about moderated news-groups, to which they explained Usenet is not moderated and anyone can post, etc, etc, etc).
After two weeks, I gave up with them.
- sieve 3y agoContact Greg Lyda at UsenetExpress. You can also reach him on reddit (https://old.reddit.com/user/greglyda https://old.reddit.com/user/greglyda). UsenetExpress is the second-biggest provider of binary news (outside of Omicron, which owns Eweka, Newshosting, UsenetServer & Tweaknews)
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoYou can always use the trick used to post into moderated alt.hackers. You don't need a server to manage approvals of your own postings.
- 15457345234 3y agoIs that the same trick alt.sysadmin.recovery used to use?
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoProbably. Usenet moderation works on the honor system. There is no standard for verifying who gave an approval and you can usually do it yourself.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- immibis 3y agoAFAIK all the major usenet providers except for EternalSeptember (which is for discussion) are just download sites for pirated movies. That's why they don't know about moderated groups, and why they have the price structure they do.
- immibis 3y agoI should update this to say it is alive but unwell - text-based Usenet is apparently now mostly relegated to cranks who get banned everywhere else, as well as discussion of the Usenet system itself. However, there are several providers (not just E-S), and it's beginning to enjoy a little resurgence in 2023 due to what's been happening in the social media sphere. I encourage everyone to try it out. I made an account on E-S using my email address, and connected with Thunderbird.
- Parker51 3y agoCheck out Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC ("Panix"). They run their own news server, know about moderated newsgroups, host several newsgroup moderation teams, and have reasonable rates ($100/year) for NNTP Usenet access and a Unix shell account.