Re: Automatic NewsGroups

[The Wizard of Oz <wizard@emeraldcity.gov>]

On Sun, 21 Mar 2004 21:08:48 +0000, Bryan Parkoff wrote:

<snip>

	I see the use of Google was suggested twice. If all you want is text this
is a good choice. It may take a little more work, but they go back much
farther than you want.

	There are two other alternatives (and you do not have to run *NIX for
anything I say in this message). ;-)

1) Take a look at alt.free.newsservers. Lurk for a while and find a free
server. They are slow as anything but they generally have a terrific
retention time. If you are into text only you may want to try either
news.readfreenews.net or allnews.readfreenews.net. I don't think they
allow posting. You can use your ISP for posting. Other free servers you
may want to look at are... powernews.libero.it news.wplus.net news.c99.com
news.individual.net and news3.telebyte.nl. Since they are free/test
servers they may or may not be available at any given time.

2) There is a program (and I forgot to take a note of the web page) which
sets up a virtual server on a machine. What it does is to connect to
multiple servers and download the headers. When it has done it's thing,
you point your favourite news reader at it. When you want to read a
message (or download a binary), it will go to the place where it found the
articles and get the contents. If you have a couple of free news servers
in your list it will be transparent as to where they come from. If you
lurk around alt.free.newsservers for a while, the author will occasionally
post the link.

	Ideally for text only groups I think coming up with an Apple//
application would be great. Just leave the computer on all day and
download new messages every hour. Have a built in reader and expire the
messages manually. Storing the messages on a ProDOS partition should be
possible as long as the user doesn't get into binaries. 32Meg should be
more than enough. No matter how you look at it 32Meg *is* a whole lot of
text.

				Later
				Mike