Eternal-september problems (2023 Update)

ES is working fine for me. aioe.org is also okay. (I use both of those as well as Supernews.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Says it's down and I'm not getting new massages, but maybe it's my Thunderbird problem. Mikek

Supernews is flakey sometimes, especially on weekends.

These problems, and problems with a functional application are the reasons why I use Google Groups. I used Thunderbird for a few years until it took a crap. Then I switched to Seamonkey until it took a crap. GG may be a piece of crap, but it doesn't crap on the data base.

The reality is, newsgroups are not used by many. I'm only here out of habit. There are plenty of other places that are just as good and not so many weirdos.

Speaking of that, Larkin won't use the other groups because they won't tolerate his nonsense. He loves to complain about everyone else trashing the group, while he is one of the biggest offenders. He would not last 10 minutes on eevblog. I've even had disagreements with Dave there, and it never gets ugly, because people are just reasonable. Larkin would be called out in an instant.

I just don't see that. You might rethink that and check to see if your liberal thinking is clouding your mind, causing you to think that, just because he doesn't agree with your politics. Mikek

AIOE is a reasonable free option as long as you only want text groups and can live with the handful of peculiar groups that are banned.

uk.tech.tv (was on the banned list - may still be)

I use AIOE and seldom hit the daily posting limit which I think is 50.

I have Eternal-September as a backup and I can't see anything wrong with their feed at the moment (apart from a very large number of unread threads). I haven't needed to use it for a couple of years...

Their feed seems to be complete up to and including all today's posts.

ES is working fine for me. I use MicroPlanet Gravity to read it with.

A few days (weeks?) ago Eternal September started to ask me for username and password every time I post. Which is not a problem for me, I rarely post every day. But it is a change, not sure if thunderbird or eternal september do that, I may try to update thunderbird these days. No need for me to investigate anyway, just reporting the change I see.

Ignore him.

There was a bug in TB that if the server ever says "get lost" or times out it will insist on a username and password next time around. (even if both are blank)

You can also get that if security certificates don't quite match.

I used to have a Teranews text groups only lifetime subscription (still do) but that stopped working completely a few years ago.

I switched to ES a few months ago when Giga-NEws started to give me read access problems.

I've had little trouble with ES reading groups, although the odd time the spinning Apple circle appears as Thunderbird isn't happy with something or ES is playing hard to read. It comes back without any real intervention on my part if I go to rummage in my regular mail folders and then wander back a little later..

John :-#)#

I didn't say anything about anyone's politics. I'm talking about how he constantly moans and groans about the noise level here, while being one of the biggest noise sources. He loves nothing more than to jump into off topic threads or to go off topic within a thread. That's hard to deny. If you think this has anything to do with his political opinions, you need to look at bit more clearly.

But the fact remains, that many people have abandoned newsgroups because they are kludgy, while web sites are so much easier. I can't even use Google Groups from my phone. Posting about technical issues is something I would like to do when I am not at my computer. Even email is a PITA on the phone. Web browsing is one thing that mostly works (other than GG for who knows what reason).

I guess Terranew's lifetime expired.

It's not hard to deny at all. I suggest you look at the last 100 or so threads either started by him or where he comments, and you'll find a lot more on topic for this NG than off topic. If I had to criticise him for anything, It not using "OT" at the front of a subject when he starts an off topic post, but then that's not unusual amongst OT posters in this NG, as most of them don't use it.

If you think this has anything to do with his political opinions, you need to look at bit more clearly.

That's more than halfway towards a contradiction in terms, apart from being inaccurate. Most posters here don't seem to have a problem with TB or other news clients. I don't use GG, but I see there are quite a few here using G2/1.0. Anyway, one thing GG doesn't do is access non-usenet news servers.

Almost anything on a smartphone is a PITA compared to doing it with a computer. I /can/ access NGs with mine using Piaohong, but it isn't anywhere near as easy as doing it with TB.

You seem confused. His on topic posts don't excuse the contradiction in his complaining about off topic posts and his contribution to off topic posts. The same goes for his complaining about others being "nasty" while he, himself can be quite nasty.

Not at all. Google groups is one way to access newsgroups, but there are many other forums on the web that have nothing to do with newsgroups. Many, many more people use those forums than are using groups like s.e.d. The DSP group was actually killed on Google groups because it was disused and had significant spam. The Forth programming group on GG was closed for a while until someone got it restored. Many other groups are functionally dead, such as comp.lang.vhdl, comp.arch.embedded, and many others. Although, I did get a number of replies on comp.arch.embedded to the RS-422 issue. While people are there, it just seems like no one posts anything.

Yes, most newsgroup users are using news clients. That is dinosaur stuff that keeps most engineers away. Newsgroups are dying off. This has actually been discussed here many times. I've never seen anyone try to refute that.

I've thought about getting a tablet for use on the plane, but it's just another clumsy gadget that is an opportunity to go wrong. Android seems to be hard to learn about, or maybe it's just that I've used Windows for 30 years. I do seem to cuss at the phone a lot more than my PC. I wonder if that's good for your health, or detrimental? Venting your frustrations with an outburst, vs. letting them get the better of you so you create an outburst. I really do cuss at the damn phone from time to time. It took me several minutes today to figure out how to copy a phone number of someone who sent me a phone message, or a text message (I forget which) so I could use it in the other.

Let's see the figures for recent posts. I cleared my TB cache for s.e.d, and asked it to download the latest 1000 posts. I then asked it to search for "Larkin" in "From".

It found 159 matches. He initiated only three posts; they were all "on topic". Of his replies, there were 92 to "on topic" posts, and 67 to "off topic" posts.

That doesn't seem a particularly bad s/n ratio compared to many other posters here.

I can't comment on his complaining about off-topic posts, or nasty comments. Perhaps you can provide some Message-IDs for typical posts? Then I can make my own mind up.

I tend to agree with you, but that's because it's what everybody says. I've no actual figures for comparison, but according to

, usenet use is still increasing, although it appears to be tailing off. And that's despite many ISPs cutting direct access to usenet. Are there any figures for forum use? One of the advantages (disadvantages?) of usenet is that most of it isn't moderated, whereas, as far as I understand, all forum use is moderated.

Mozilla seems to think there is enough life in news clients to keep developing TB. Against that is that they have merged TB with K-9 for email use under Android, but aren't going to include TB's news client functions.

See my comment above concerning usenet figures.

I have a small (8") tablet which was bought 6 years ago for one purpose only - so my wife could view family posts on FB. That's all it is used for now. I don't access FB on other devices. I can't stand Android; it's typical of a Google OS - opaque, unhelpful, and you've no idea what is going on in the background. I can understand your copy/paste issue with phone numbers - it's typical. My pet hate is why the browsers don't have a "forward" arrow to go back to the page you've just use the back arrow on by mistake!

Thank you for proving my point.

If a court justice were railing about the people who hire illegal immigrants and it was disclosed that they, themselves, among a dozen household employees, had two illegal immigrants, would that be a good ratio?

Uh, I'm not trying to convince you, your honor.

??? Do you mean you are taking people's word for it? The reality is there are precious few working, useful newsgroups for discussing technical issues. There are any number of active, productive web sites, like eevblog, stackexchange and many others. I have a hard time remembering their names.

That may be true, but that's not the question. We are talking about alternatives to s.e.d. The traffic on who.knows.what.grows.in.my.garden is not relevant.

Not sure why you call the lack of moderation an advantage. That does highlight another disconnections with Larkin. He would love for s.e.d to be moderated, but only if it is moderated the way he wants. He won't go to other groups because he is afraid of being moderated.

Eevblog is moderated, but in no way that interferes with discussion. I think I've already mentioned that I was in a conversation where I disagreed with Dave himself with no repercussions. I didn't tip toe around the issue, either. The moderation there is appropriate, and useful. It's just what Larkin would like, except that he would not be in charge of it.

TB is an email program that also does newsgroups. I used it for a couple/three years, until it crashed and wiped out the data files. Same with it's first cousin, Seamonkey. They aren't stable enough to rely on. I was thinking of using them for my email too, but not after twin crashes.

I know what you are saying about the tools, but Chrome on Android does have a forward button. It's in the menu rather than being directly on the window like the back button.

I also have trouble "managing" my files under Android, but that's because I don't know enough. I have a 32 GB flash card in it, but not much used because I don't know how to get the tools to look there as well as the limited in phone flash. It's actually getting full, so maybe I need to spend some time on that problem. I don't want to reach a point where I can't do something because the internal flash is full.

On phones, the only alternative is Apple, and I'm not ready to go that route yet.

Is Eternal-september.org down? Checking if eternal-september.org is down or it is just you... It's just you. eternal-september.org is up.

Try

Works fine.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Normally the browser adds all that for you. I wonder what is mucking up?