Usenet Explorer

My yearly subscription to Newsfeeds is about to come due and I'm curious to hear what other servers are available. I've looked at the websites for UltraFeed and UseNetServer but would like to hear people's opinions on what they think of those servers.

Of course any other suggested Usenet servers would be appreciated as well!

Check alt.free.newsservers and alt.binaries.news-server-comparison regularly for server comparisons.

I still recommend Newsfeeds, especially if it's being used with NewsPro. I've heard good comments about Astraweb and Ultrafeed, supposedly they are a better choice than UNS, but retention is just a few days at best I hear.

Easynews is a great service, though a bit pricey if you're a heavy downloader.

I use the ones of www.newscene.com
and they are good, very fast (at least at my place).

I am thinking in the future to use usenetserver.com, because you can post anonymously, unlimited download amounts, good looking homepage of them, not expensive considering they say to offer.

But I don't know about the quality of service for example. Do the servers work most of the time? Do you really get what they promise?

I have newspro version of 3.71 which solves the problems with xpat search in their servers, so there does not seem to be problems.

Can someone comment please?

Nearly any Usenet service lets you "post anonymously". The fact is, however, that you can only get so anonymous when your person information is tied to an account of some sort. Posting through Usenetserver will leave you with the same legal liability as posting through Easynews or Newsfeeds. These are much better than posting through your ISP or somewhere that your IP address is exposed, however. I've posted many games and music albums through Newsfeeds, Easynews, Usenetserver, etc. but have never received any warnings. I posted one file of a large set of files for a game through my ISP, however, and received a warning just a few days later.

UNS retention, from what I hear, has been inreased recently, but still does not come anywhere close to Newsfeeds or Easynews retention. Completion is good, but because their load balancer sucks you often get different servers on the backend and thus get different levels of completion at different times (ie. news.usenetserver.com directs you to a random server behind the scenes in order to balance the user load, and some of those backend servers have less retention and/or completion than others.)

Thank you for your reply.

It gets clearer now. The unlimited download is still an attractive feature i think.

One question though: is there a difference between servers in anonimity with respect the things I download?
So does one company record what i download, and the other one does not for example?