[off-topic] Usenet

[Duncan Booth]

hdante <hdante at gmail.com> wrote:

>  How can I access Usenet without using Google Groups ? (my ISP doesn't
> have a NNTP server). Do you recommend doing so ?

Yes, even those ISP's who do have a news server often seem to make a mess 
of maintaining it. I use news.individual.net which seems to do a pretty 
good job of filtering out spam messages (or at least I see a lot more 
messages complaining about spam messages than spam messages themselves).

Also, it is a lot cheaper than most third party news servers: 10EUR per 
year for 25,000 newsgroups. See http://news.individual.net/

>  What's your prefered news reader ?

XNews, but that's mostly just because I'm used to it. It is getting a bit 
elderly these days and doesn't handle non-ascii encodings very well. It 
does have good scorefile support though.

I use Hamster to actually retrieve news: Hamster runs as a local newsserver 
and pulls feeds from as many different news servers as I want to configure 
presenting them all as though they come from the same server. That means I 
can use my ISPs server as a backup in case I can't access 
news.individual.net for any reason (my previous ISP kept 'accidentally' 
throttling usenet access): Hamster just merges the newsfeeds together and 
is intelligent enough not to fetch a message twice from different servers.

I also recommend Gmane which provides a free news server for most mailing 
lists: mailing lists are a lot more manageable when gatewayed into a news 
server. If you just want to access comp.lang.python I think you'll find the 
mailing list to which it is connected is available for free on Gmane.