Comcast Dropping Usenet

Per Samuel M. Goldwasser:

Individual.net has been good to me for a few years now.

It's about $18 per year - close enough to free for me.

--
PeteCresswell

Thanks, that was just what I was looking for.

ADSL is unavailable in much of the country, including many places that aren't nearly as isolated as one might think.

I live 25 miles outside Nashville in a neighborhood filling with "McMansions". Here, it's either Charter or dialup. No FIOS, no DSL, no wireless. (my Sprint phone doesn't even work unless I go outside...)

And blocked by many users because of the amount of SPAM and troll messages that originate from that site.

Now that's a real answer -- and I appreciate that you are forthright enough to give one -- which could well account for the insistance of allodox and uclan that it wasn't a sig. Maybe that's their reason too.

But WADR I'm not convinced it's true.

says nothing about any required delimiter.

doesn't either.

says only: "Avoid long rambling signatures. Keep your sig short and simple. MT-NewsWatcher encourages the "McQuary limit" for signatures-at most four lines of at most 80 characters each; if you enter a longer sig in the Personalities dialog, it will warn you. You cannot enter a sig longer than 8 lines."

I could keep looking, but I have other reasons to think a sig file needs no delimiter.

1) When I started on Usenet, v. 0.99 was the current version of Agent. I don't think it recognized --b as something special, and neither it nor any version up to v 1.93, which I'm using now, inserted those characters. The sig file is whatever one types in the sig field, which later gets appended to an individual article's text, afaict.

In addition, IIRC, --b was an innovation a few years after I started in Usenet. I don't think such a later innovation works to redefine sig. retroactively.

AFAIK even later versions of Agent** don't add a delimiter, and there are certainly times, not with a sig as long as mine is now, but with a short one, when someone might not want his sig stripped, maybe if it were a copyright notice or the disclaimer "I am not a lawyer".

**Now maybe some think that Agent is not "proper" for this reason (although v1.93 and higher, and maybe some lower versions do strip the

--b delimited sigs) but I've looked at OE and Netscape and maybe one or two other news readers, and even early versions of Agent have far more commands and are far more versatile. There are a couple features (like allowng a different email -from address for posts and emails) that my version doesn't have that OE does have, but newer versions of Agent have those now.

I think this might be a cultural difference, like in some cultures it's polite to burp after the meal, or to leave food on the plate to prove one has had enough. If one lives with a newsreader that auto inserts the --b, it seems like the proper thing to do, but if one lives in Agent world, it doesn't seem necessary.

BTW, FWIW, I think Agent is the only newsreader that has its own newsgroup, two of them actually. One for modifying the code. OE etc. has one or more NGs but most of the traffic is about email, I think.

For one reason or another, you don't see it, but Franc and I do. All 3 characters. When I reply to my own posts on this group, the sig. gets stripped.

The sig just above wasn't stripped when you replied, and watching the insertion point, it surely appears that there is no space after the

--. But I put a space in the sig text, and when I reply to the same post, the sig gets stripped. If you're using mozilla and it stripped trailing spaces, no sig would get auto-trimmed for you, and I'm sure that's not the situation. Another confusing computer moment.

Best regards,

--
A tribute to Erols/RCN/Starpower which took away newsgroups, 
without giving any notice, in advance or when they did it!!

And a real tribute to https://www.forteinc.com/apn/subscribe.php 
which starts at 3 dollars for 12 gigs a month, 
including alt, misc, the big 8 and everything else, 12 gigs is
far more than someone who dl's mostly text should ever need.

"Read my sig" was meant to tell the OP that he should look at the bottom for critical information, in case he became bored by the details in the text about what was needed for conversion, etc.

And why would that matter to the OP?

Why does he have to know?

As long as he reads to the end, he'll see the part I especially wanted him to see.

My post in reply to Michael disputes the notion that a sig. has to start with --b. I don't think it does, so therefore Google can't verify that there was no sig. Such a sig. can be recognized when it appears over and over after*** every article a person posts. ***Of course one or more newsreaders allow for inserting a sig. other than at the end.

I already know that I have a morbid curiosity about things like this and the people who do them. But you didn't answer why you thought it important enough to post. You may have more time for self-examination.

--
A tribute to Erols/RCN/Starpower which took away newsgroups, 
without giving any notice, in advance or when they did it!!

And a real tribute to https://www.forteinc.com/apn/subscribe.php 
which starts at 3 dollars for 12 gigs a month, 
including alt, misc, the big 8 and everything else, 12 gigs is
far more than someone who dl's mostly text should ever need.

files.

I'm sure lots of people -- including business people -- would strongly disagree.

Are you still living in the 17th century?

Absolutely. A decent data link can reduce the amount of post etc previously sent by road - and faster and at lower cost.

Whatever the pros and cons of private versus public finance one thing can be sure, you don't want to let just one private company carry it out - otherwise they are likely to try and benefit unreasonably from a monopoly situation.

--
*A backward poet writes inverse.*

    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

I didn't see a sig either. Perhaps your server is stripping it?

--


----== Posted via Pronews.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.pronews.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups
---= - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

Except it does--the last paragraph under "Email and Usenet" metions that it "must be delimited from the body of the message by a single line consisting of exactly two hyphens, followed by a space, followed by the end of line...."

That's because MT-NewsWatcher automatically inserts the delimiter for you. I know, as I use it and have it insert a signature. (It's a quite nice newsreader program, by the way.)

It's a long-standing convention in Usenet that the signature should be preceded by a dash-dash-space delimiter. I guess it's not "needed" in the sense that you can send a message without one, but there are good reasons to play along with the accepted rules, too. A great many newsreaders will automatically trim off signatures thus demarked when creating a followup message, for example.

--
Andrew Erickson

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot
lose."  -- Jim Elliot

Because *you* instructed him to *read your sig*. If he looked for a sig, he found none. You instructed him to read something that didn't exist.

paper mail is just the beginning. (dialup is sufficient for that) a decent data link can reduce the number of people sent by road

Bye. Jasen

Really ?

In some instances like teleworking the internet can REPLACE the road.

Graham

then

news. I

groups.

Limited number of posts per day (not many) and NO cross-posting.

Graham

OK for low volume users only.

I use it too sometimes.

Graham

They also tolerate Usenet abusers. One reason I HATE them.

Graham

Tssk. But then the UK has the advantage of being a smaller place. And telecoms (including internet service) is highly deregulated.

For example I have 2 physical phone lines. One can provide ADSL, the other has cable attached. If I felt the need to combine the two (and this can be done) I could be essentially 'fault tolerant' and obtain speeds in in the 40 Mbps region.

Graham

Which is precisely the reason why having the government build the infrastructure with public dollars makes so much sense. It encourages competition and potentially keeps costs down to the consumer..

Ummm... Have you forgotten that you're talking about the government here?

"Government" and "keeping costs down" are mutually exclusive concepts.

--
Don Bruder - dakidd@sonic.net - If your "From:" address isn't on my whitelist,
or the subject of the message doesn't contain the exact text "PopperAndShadow"
somewhere, any message sent to this address will go in the garbage without my
ever knowing it arrived. Sorry...  for more info