A little newsgroups help

fill-server

Without a for-pay fill-server as backup, it can be very frustrating trying to download using just your ISP server, if it's the kind that has only has a few days retention and a lot of incompletes.

If you don't want to pay the cost of a monthly account, you can get a "block account" to supplement your ISP news server. Usenet providers like Astraweb http://news.astraweb.com and Usenet-News http://usenet-news.net sell gigabyte blocks of download that never expire, so you can pay just once and use it up gradually, as long as it takes, whenever you need a few files every now and then that are missing from your ISP news server.

In a lot of binary news clients, you can set up the servers as a primary and secondary, which means that it will first try to download from your free ISP server, then for any part that is not there, it will then automatically try to download that missing file from your paid block account.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by exie1234

Annoyed,

Verizon has a 7 day retention date. I also have it. It basically means if you don't DL w/in the first 7 days of something being posted, Verizon won't be able to get it for you.

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Thank you. I just recently found this out myself about Verizon. So that's why all the stuff I was trying to download wouldn't, well...download.

And thank you zot. I'm actually going to for a pay for access very soon. I'm just trying to get all the knowledge that I can now(just got hooked up with a really nice server recently). So after that, I think I'm going to go with Giganews. Seems the best with the 200 day retention.

Hmm....my ISP is Novis/Clix in PT. Can I get newsgroup access through this?