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From: Andrzej Matuch <andrzej@matu.ch>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: OT: Blocknews problematic with comp.os.linux.advocacy
Date: Sun, 5 May 2024 12:13:26 -0400
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 2024-05-05 10:10 a.m., DFS wrote:
> On 5/5/2024 8:09 AM, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
> 
>> To anyone using Blocknews, are you having issues with 
>> comp.os.linux.advocacy? It works well with Eternal September.
> 
> 
> issues galore since Jan/Feb.
> 
> For years BN was great: fast, cheap and reliable.  And good tech 
> support.  Earlier this year they moved to new server(s), and screwed 
> everything up.
> 
> * connections are now flaky.  python code I ran for years suddenly got 
> very slow or froze.
> 
> * using Thunderbird/Betterbird, all of a sudden clicking on a message 
> won't download the body.  Go to the next one and it downloads, but the 
> previous one is permanently stuck and absolutely will not download, 
> unless you restart the client and try again.
> 
> * messages I posted used to show up as new in 2-3 seconds.  Now 
> sometimes they won't show up for 10 minutes.
> 
> * they renumbered all their articles; cola used to start with 2, now it 
> starts with 899518, and the new numbering overlaps with the old numbers. 
>   And now there are huge gaps in the numbering - sometimes 20 or 30 
> numbers in a row will say 'Article not found'.
> 
> * I found dupes in the 2 groups I looked at (cola and comp.lang.c): the 
> same messageID but two different article numbers.   This is a huge no-no.
> 
> * issuing .xover commands sometimes returns a blank xref header (xref 
> lists the groups the message was posted/crossposted to).
> 
> 
> These BN issues are probably the same for all groups, but we (I at 
> least) spend most of our time on cola so we see more problems here.
> 
> But it's still fast to download messages off BN compared to 
> eternal-september.  And blocknews is one of the few that sells cheap 
> blocks of downloads.  Most Usenet services want a monthly subscription; 
> I paid $10 for 50GB on Blocknews and used about 1/3 of it in 5 years.

I'm going to open up another ticket with them mentioning the issues you 
listed above. I had problems but couldn't prove it was on their end. 
Since you have done a good job of explaining the issues, I'll just sent 
it over and hope that they fix it.

-- 
Andrzej (Andre) Matuch
TG: @AndrzejMatuch
Catholic, paleoconservative, Christ is king.