Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:

>> Same with news.novabbs.org which only serves an IP address from
>> Australia. If they don't tell you that, how are you supposed to
>> know that?
>
> I would expect a news server that is country specific to say that
> somewhere and to refuse to create an account if you are outside of the
> country.

I snipped what I thoroughly agreed with and which I had nothing more to
add. On this one news.novabbs.org:119 setup, there are no credentials
required that I know of.

You just have to know that if your IP address geolocates outside of
Australia, they won't pass on your posts (as far as I'm aware).

My only point in bringing that up is that's why documentation helps.

> There are multiple -- what I'll call -- open news servers that don't
> require accounts to be able to read or post. These servers are often
> sources of spam and are generally frowned upon by many in the news
> community because of the spam problems that tend to plague them.

I'm well aware of the many lists of supposedly open free public news
servers where the reality isn't as great as the lists tend to imply.
free.xsusenet.com:119
gail.ripco.com:119
hufu.ki.iif.hu:119
killfile.org:119
maddog.stanford.edu:119
news.ausics.net:119
news.cn99.com:119
news.freedyn.de:119
news.grc.com:119
news.samoylyk.net:119
news.skz.or.jp:119
news.uni-stuttgart.de:119
news.wieslauf.de:119
news2.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de:119
news2.neva.ru:119
post.usenet.com:119
pubnews.gradwell.net:119
remote5bge0.ripco.com:119
test.news.mediaways:119
textnews.news.cambrium.nl:119
tor-nn1-ca.netcom.ca:119
tulanet.com:119
www.an.cc.mn.us:119
and now
news.novabbs.org:119

>> It certainly works (as I've used it myself in the past) but can you
>> post to this newsgroup? You don't know. You can only guess. And that's
>> the issue.
>
> You don't have to guess. You can test to find out.

Allow me to take the example of an app you're considering installing on
your phone. You can install the app and test it out, and then hate it.
Or, most of the time you can just READ what it does, and you know it's not
for you from the documentation. It's more efficient that way.

>> That's not intuitive that it works that way, right? Someone has to
>> explain it to you as you'd never guess, right?
>
> I vaguely remember reading some documentation on Gmane's site years ago
> when I last set up a client to access them. I was able to successfully
> connect using the documentation that they provided at the time.

Me too. But you have to know that gmane did things differently.
So does this nova rocksolid group seem to do things different.
It helps when that's documented, that's all.

>> I think the easiest way to explain how (I remember) gmane to work is
>> that ALL groups are moderated by the gmane admin, not only moderated
>> newsgroups.
>
> I always viewed Gmane as a read-only archive of many different mailing
> lists. If you wanted to post to one of the lists, you had to do so via
> the mailing list.

I definitely posted using Gmane, Mozilla, Dizum (in the past) and Mixmin
via my newsreader settings. I've never sent anything through the email.

>> Or that aioe doesn't allow posting to alt.privacy or some other
>> oddball restriction when you would "guess" completely different than
>> the reality.
>
> In the news / NNTP world, try it and see if it works.

It's not that simple when, for example, you get a badword from paganini or
when you get a bad group when you respond to someone elses' post on aioe.

Paganini, for example, won't tell you the badword and there is never a bad
word, per se, it's always a mistake but you can't do anything about it. You
have to carefully send the same message a dozen or more times (depending on
the length of course) to figure out which paragraph has the badword.

In every case, there is no bad word but it thinks there was one.

It's similar with aioe's groups where luckily you're only posting to a
handful of groups at a time at most, so when you respond to a post that has
multiple groups and when aioe blocks it, you can drop the groups out out
one by one.

It's the price you pay for a free news server.

>> I could try to post but I already know dizum doesn't allow posting
>> but I only know that from experience. Which is my issue with the
>> rocksolid page.
>
> Hence why I say try things via NNTP. If they work, great. If they
> don't, oh well. You might ask for help in various places or try other
> things.

Well, I do sometimes test things out with telnet. For example,
telnet news.neodome.net 119
Trying 95.216.243.224...
Connected to neodome.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 news.neodome.net InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.6.3 ready (posting ok)

help
200 news.neodome.net InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.6.3 ready (posting ok)
100 Legal commands
ARTICLE [message-ID|number]
AUTHINFO USER name|PASS password|GENERIC program [argument ...]
BODY [message-ID|number]
CAPABILITIES [keyword]
COMPRESS DEFLATE
DATE
GROUP newsgroup
HDR header [message-ID|range]
HEAD [message-ID|number]
HELP
IHAVE message-ID
LAST
LIST [ACTIVE [wildmat]|ACTIVE.TIMES [wildmat]|COUNTS
[wildmat]|DISTRIB.PATS|DISTRIBUTIONS|HEADERS
[MSGID|RANGE]|MODERATORS|MOTD|NEWSGROUPS
[wildmat]|OVERVIEW.FMT|SUBSCRIPTIONS [wildmat]]
LISTGROUP [newsgroup [range]]
MODE READER
NEWGROUPS [yy]yymmdd hhmmss [GMT]
NEWNEWS wildmat [yy]yymmdd hhmmss [GMT]
NEXT
OVER [range]
POST
QUIT
STARTTLS
STAT [message-ID|number]
XGTITLE [wildmat]
XHDR header [message-ID|range]
XOVER [range]
XPAT header message-ID|range pattern [pattern ...]
Report problems to <use...@neodome.net>.
..

group alt.free.newsservers
211 6388 1364 8211 alt.free.newsservers

group alt.free.newsservers
211 6388 1364 8211 alt.free.newsservers
next
body
post
340 Ok, recommended message-ID <kha21v$6wbn$1@neodome.net>
from: foo@bar.com
subject: This is a test.
message-id: <kha21v$6wbn$1@neodome.net>
newsgroups: alt.free.newsservers

This is a test.
..

quit

> Mozilla and Gmane were NNTP servers. They were not Usenet servers.
>
> Usenet is a network of news servers exchanging articles over a fairly
> common newsgroup list. Usenet servers /usually/ use NNTP to exchange
> articles. However there are other protocols that they can use to
> exchange articles. So Usenet doesn't /imply/ NNTP, it only /strongly/
> /suggests/ it.

This is a wonderful clarifcation. Thanks.

>> Are they brand new like paganini? Or old but new again like blueworld?
>> Or even old but nobody knew about like maddog.stanford.edu?
>
> I would not consider paganini to be new, much less brand new.

I only heard of them within the past year or less.
It's not like blueworld where Jesse was here a lot & then gone & then back.
Had you heard of paganini bofh much earlier than only a few months ago?

> Be aware that there have been spates of spam in the recent months and
> news administrators have been actively fighting it trying to get it
> stopped or at least slowed down. There is a very real chance that
> they've not finished, much less updated the documentation to reflect the
> recent changes that they've been trying.

I feel sorry for the news server admins because of the horrible spammers,
and I mean that. They ruin everything for everyone and they enjoy doing
that.

> Having been around cars, machines, and batteries, I'll say this: they
> have batteries in them and batteries have a 3-5 year lifespan. As such
> it seems natural to me that they would eventually fail.
>
> I think it's unfair to complain about something that's only guaranteed
> to work for three years after five years.

You just elicited the exact problem I'm talking about, but I am not here to
chastise you but to just make my point known that to guess is always wrong.

The guarantee is nothing but lies, in terms of what it implies. For
example, what good is a bandaid from J&J guarranteed to be sterile?

It's complete bullshit. right? What are they going to do if it's not
sterile? Give you your finger back?

Marketing preys on people assuming things that aren't spoken. You assume
it's sterile if they "guarantee" that it's sterile. You assume that the
charger will start your car when you need to if you watch an advertisement
on mount kimanjaro where the car starts right up with the thing.

Almost every marketing ad is bullshit leading people to guess in the
direction that the marketing people want you to guess in.

Hence, it's perfectly fair to point out that the battery charger jumper
thingey will not work when you need it most, but that's only one example of
marketing leading you to believe something does what it doesn't do.

I don't like having to guess because when I guess, I always guess wrong.

If you have to guess, you'll more than likely be wrong, and the more you
know, the more you'll be wrong because you have more corner cases to
process.

Sigh. It's how marketing works. They only tell you what they WANT you to
know and then they lead you to GUESS at the rest. I hate that.

> I know that Consumer Reports used to be a good source of information for
> some things so that you could learn from other people's hassle. But
> this process is a natural, all be it bad, part of a consumer society and
> people trying to turn a buck.

Marketing makes you think a 60L sodastream canister will get you 60 liters
of soda water but nobody ever gets that even though that's nominal.

Marketing for sodastream sells you 1 liter bottles which only hold 800 ml
of soda water. They want you to guess it's a liter becasue that's how it's
sold.

Marketing is always leading you to guess in the wrong direction but always
in their favor, and I, for one, don't like to guess because I can guess in
more directions than only the direction marketing wants to lead me.

If you know cars, then you can guess that non-asbestos organic won't stop
as well as semi metallic which won't stop as well as ceramic but you'd be
guessing wrong since the stopping power doesn't have any direct
relationship to how many specs of dust they put in the pads for marketing
purposes.

Likewise, if you buy SAE 10W30 API SN (or whatever) motor oil for one
dollar a quart versus the same viscosity for ten dollars a quart, you'd
guess that the API is better for the ten dollar but it's almost never that
way.

When you have to guess, you're a marketing person's dream customer.
Anyway, I mostly agree with your points so we're in almost violent
agreement. Thanks.

I've asked for an account but I haven't checked my mail yet.
The i2p stuff will have to happen later, over time.
--
Please wear your mask!
Bugs are everywhere. :)
!__!
(@)(@)
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