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From: VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH>
Newsgroups: alt.free.newsservers,news.admin.peering
Subject: Re: Admins of borked Usenet providers have vanished.
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2024 22:42:01 -0600
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Retro Guy <retroguy@novabbs.com> wrote on 9 Mar 2024:

> Vaniko wrote on 4 Mar 2023:
> 
>> Yet another nntp service is borked with no word from its owner.
> 
>> The Rocksolid Usenet / NNTP servers are no longer authenticating to 
>> allow posts.
> 
>> There is no word from the admin yet on what is going on. In fact the 
>> admin has yet to acknowledge that he is still alive.
> 
> I know this is an old message to reply to, but I just saw it so why
> not. 
> 
> I'm the admin of Rocksolid, etc. When you posted this I was in a
> medically induced coma following a major surgery that was preceded by
> another major surgery, followed by 8 months of chemotherapy. There
> were several months where I could do nothing to administrate
> anything. (There were weeks that I have no memory of at all). 
> 
> I assume whatever the issue was with the servers resolved itself, as
> people have been using them since.
> 
>> Why would an administrator make no statement acknowledging the status of 
>> a service that has gone down or is broken?
> 
> Death?

Yep.  Tough to login to your computer to compose an announcement of your
death after getting squashed by a semi, drowned at sea by the Perfect
Storm, or zapped to a crispy walking dead by lightning.

Other causes can be disinterest, getting busy with real life, operator
disappeared (moved, kidnapped, disappeared behind the Great Firewall),
ran out of money for his altruistic ventures, served an NSL but decided
to quit rather than lie to users about logging, or a disability that
prevents doing much of anything.

The owner of Spamgourmet (Josh) had a debilitating disease that made it
harder and harder to work on his anonymizing e-mail service until he got
hospitalized during which his son tried to take over.  The son (Josiah)
was woefully unprepared for the task, did an unnecessary update that
killed some features of the service, would announce only in the web
forums but never participated there to see problem reports, and the son
eventually gave up.  It wasn't his hobby or personal project, anyway.
He did it to help Dad.  Dad died.  
https://bbs.spamgourmet.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1799&sid=6ae6d671a575dd8defc83224e7c82930
Son gave up on Spamgourmet.  Spamgourmet became a zombied service: works
a little bit, but too crippled and unreliable.  I had to find something
else that was similar (an aliasing e-mail service, not just an e-mail
forwarding service), and found AnonAddy.

I remember using Albasani until that operator died.  See:
http://al.howardknight.net/?STYPE=msgid&MSGI=%3C1kn498q.o2v802173ewlcN%25board%40big-8.org%3E
Someone (don't remember who) picked up the tab (effort & money) for a
while to keep albasani.net alive, but it eventually died, too.

Did anyone figure out for sure why AIOE died back around February 2023?