On Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:41:21 +1100, Krypsis >
wrote:

> A couple of days later I thought I might just check the support
>page and, sure enough, there was a statement there referring to the
>shutdown of usenet at Optus due to declining interest and links to paid
>usenet services from other ISPs. Well, that explained the outage, pity
>the helpdesk weren't told!
>
>So I have had to move myself to eternal-september.org. At least we
>usenet people still have a few options but I suspect those options will
>be getting thinner on the ground as time rolls on. Web forums seem to be
>all the rage these days but I simply don't like the needless overheads.


The big guys, ATT and Verizon dropped newsgroups a couple of years
ago. Sadly, we lost a lot of regular and good contributors that did
not sign up for other services. That increase the noise to signal
ratio too.