Free Usenet News Servers

My Server

My server is included on the list of available news servers because it is always accessible to me and I didn't want to remove it from the list. I use it for testing software involving Usenet news and for general messing around. The way it is used adversely affects it's usefulness to just about anyone but me.

Another problem with allowing public access to my server is that I have tried it before. I opened it up during a weekend and then went out of town. When I returned on Sunday night I discovered that all of my and my customer's sites had effectively been shut down for the entire weekend because of the load.

Becuase I wanted to share with the community, but am restricted as to how generous I can be, I decided to create a web based news reader. The reader is not complete, but is very functional at present. It has the following features:

• Can read from multiple news servers (including commercial ones that have given me access)
• Has good kill file capabilities.
• Very quick retrieving locally stored messages
• Fairly quick retrieving remotely stored messages
• Caches remote messages locally
• Retention is improving as I add additional storage

Newsgroup Search

• Placing a caret (^) at the start of a search string forces the search results to start exactly like your request.

  i.e. comp.lang could return comp.lang.* and alt.comp.lang.* groups, but ^comp.lang will only return comp.lang.*.

• Ending your search string with a dollar sign ($) forces all the search results to end exactly like your request.

  i.e. java could return comp.lang.java*, but java$ will only return comp.lang.java.

• Finally, if you know how a name begins and ends but are not sure if there are any other characters in the middle you can use a asterisk (*) in the middle of the search string.

  i.e. ^alt.*.d returns all of the discussion groups in the alt.* hierarchy.