I think Newsdemon was still on Omacon 2.5 years ago so maybe that was the issue.

If you’ve been following on the Usenet subreddit there has been a lot of info about Omacron being bad. They’ve run off competition and done some shady things with user data. I think they even voluntarily handed it over to the government once for a court case. They own Eweka.

Uploads do not last a lot longer on Eweka. That is a common misconception that the corporate staff at Eweka seem to be successfully pushing so they can trick you into buying their product TWICE. They own Eweka plus a bunch of other US based sites and want you to purchase an account at eweka and an account at one of their US sites. Now you can see why people are leaving Usenet, when the largest provider is shady like that.

Eweka has to follow NTD rules which are just basically the EUs version of DMCA. Both NTD and DMCA providers get all the same notices I’ve read. Maybe it takes a couple extra hours to process NTD but if you’re using automation then you will be grabbing it in the first 24 hours anyway.

Don’t waste your time paying the extra money for Eweka unless maybe you’re in the EU and just want a server close to you. They don’t have a US based server location.

I messaged the owner of the Newsgroup direct website on Reddit and asked if he would honor an old price and he did. He was very active on the Usenet subreddit.

subscriptions

Yes. You need to pay a small amount but unless you plan on downloading many TBs of stuff the cost is really small. The speeds and lack of risk makes it worthwhile for me. I think I paid $5 for a 1 TB account and I can use the free level of access at my indexers without having to pay.

Like I said in my original post, I wonder if we can get a provider to host a newsgroup for us for free?

Usenet was originally intended for sharing information but then it moved into being sort of the first social media platform then it kind of transitioned back into being mostly used for file sharing.

I can totally saturate my 1 gig internet connection with Usenet. Can download at incredible speeds. No need to ever upload. No logs of what I download. Almost instant access.

You need an indexer and you need a provider. Then you use sabnzbd to queue up what you want to download. It’s not free but depending on how much you plan to download, it’s a bargain.

For indexers I suggest drunkenslug or nzbplanet. For a provider I suggest NewsDemon or Usenet.farm. They are both good independent providers who have helped Usenet stay alive and not succumb to corporate greed.