NNTP servers

Do free NNTP servers exist anymore? It appears to me that pretty much all of the ISP's have stopped providing them.
 
Mike.

I should re-phrase my question. I know that some free servers exist but does anyone know one that has decent file retention and is up and running most of the time. Do you know of one that works?
 
Mike.

Look here at Free Usernet News
 
Tested the first one on the list with XNews and it seems OK.

Pete
 
Have you tried any of them. free servers that I've tried tend to be offline a lot and have incomplete posts and a very short list of groups. I guess you get what you pay for. I am hoping that someone knows of one that is usable.
 
Mike.

Have a read here ==>

Best Free Usenet
 
Here went to using an RSS reader plugin for my touchscreens which is a nice alternative.
 

 

Boy Pete there's no flies on you. What is an RSS reader plug-in. Are we talking about a browser pug-in? Who runs the service, your ISP?

No.
 
RSS has been around a very long time.   I utilize XML feeds for stuff also.
 
Many years ago modded my Kodak picture frames a bit for automation using RSS.
 
Read here ==> RSS (Rich Site Summary) or Really Simple Syndication
 
Lists of RSS Feeds
 
RSS, RDF, XML News Feed Resources
 
There are hundreds of RSS feed readers out there.  Thunderbird has one built in.

I've heard of RSS and I installed an RSS add-on to firefox called "brief" and it's easy to use. But back to the original question, how do you get newsgroups?
 
I see that it's another can of worms and I'll have to search around.

Google RSS newsgroups....
 
See here:
 
SABnzbd is an Open Source Binary Newsreader written in Python
 

How to use RSS to automatically download anything from Usenet

I've done a little reading and things have changed a lot since I last used usenet. I had a software called FreAgent which is now just called Agent because it is no longer free and my ISP provided an nntp server. There was no such thing as nzb files either. If you wanted to grab a multi-part file you had to download each part separately, combine the pieces and then un-compress the combined file. And there were no good nntp search tools either, you had to search things out manually.
 
I guess that I'll have to learn all over again.

Yup; lots of changes over the years. 
 
Here had a BBS running on multiple modems in the early 1980's which would just dial out to other BBS's in a store and forward fashion in information very similiar to the early usenet networks out there.  It was just text and ran on two 5 1/4 inch floppy disk using a Commodore PET computer.  While I managed the box it was part of a network of boxes across the country such that there was no centralized point of information which is what usenet is.  It was a precursor to the internet information highway and it worked fine with plain old text and modems.
 
You can also surf the Tor internet for free and probably find a few free usenet stuff there; well and secure email et al type of stuff.  It is the largest global private internet that exists today. It was conceived here in the USA many years ago.   I wrote a quickie blog on how to convert a microrouter to a Tor internet router that you could place inside of your regular home network.