For the past few days I haven't had usenet access. Didn't think much of
it at first as there are occasional outages but after 2 or 3 days I
called the helpdesk at my ISP. The helpdesk lady had no idea what I was
talking about when I mentioned usenet news. She also wasn't a lot of
help. 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.
I much prefer the ease of use and simplicity of a local client like
Thunderbird or Agent. I can only hope that eternal-september will
survive for a few more years.

--

Krypsis