Yes, the old news is that in June some US ISPs started dropping Usenet, and this continues.

It's all good.

There are other news servers besides the one you've been using at your ISP. And since many ISP's news servers suck anyway, and have sucked all along, moving to a different one probably isn't at all a bad thing. Many of us have been using non-ISP news servers for years – not because we had to, because we wanted better quality. So the only thing new is that all of a sudden you need one.

These are free nonbinary feeds I can recommend, from having set them up and used them along with my primary server, which is a very inexpensive and rock solid feed (more about that later). Why do I have multiple feeds? Because I like to keep in touch with what's out there; because I like to be able to make recommendations from personal experience when someone asks for help; because one never knows when one might need to get a different news feed.

Please note that while I listed news.usenet4all.se for a few weeks, during that time they were down for a period of about three days once and as of July 4 (2008) they currently have been down for another three days. So they're no longer recommended. If you happened to use them from the earlier recommendation, that's regrettable; they did seem reliable during my initial evaluation, but it's time now to move on to one of the others shown on this page.

And as for that inexpensive pay feed I mentioned above, it costs all of 10 euros (US = $15 and some cents right now) per year.

Individual Net

Note that one place on Individual Net's site they say that you have to use a real email address – but if you read all of their setup information they also say you don't have to. For more on that, see this page.

Odds...