Before you go out and pay for any kind of newsgroup access (adult or
otherwise) please read the promotional materials of your ISP. Why? Because
virtually all ISPs provide newsgroup servers for their subscribers. These
newsgroup servers are free to subscribers and they are generally NOT
censored. They may not offer all of the newsgroups in which you are
interested, but if you don't have specific groups in mind these may be
just the ticket.
The primary advantages of the ISP newsgroup server, in general, are:
- Comes free with service
- Usually uncensored
- Usually unlimited bandwidth
- Contains newsgroups related to service (a good argument for using
the ISP newsgroup servers in addition to paid ones if you do go
elsewhere).
Some disadvantages include:
- Not their primary business (just an add-on), so generally not well
maintained
- Often does not carry some of the larger binary newsgroups
- May be censored (haven't found one that's censored yet, but you
never know).
- If you change ISPs you've lost your feed to the newsgroup servers
(but they are easy to find so who cares?)
Some of the newsgroup servers that I've found while surfing the net are
listed below.
- Terranews
- This is a service which offers free and paid access to newsgroups.
They claim to allow access to all newsgroups, and the spot checking that
I did supports this claim. You simply sign up for an account (and a free
account does require a credit card to validate age) and define the news
server in your newsgroup client. It took me less than 5 minutes.
- Google
- Believe it or not, Google now offers access to newsgroup archive
searches. The advantage to this feature is that it's free and easy. The
disadvantage is
Google does not support binary files, and they do not seem to keep
the archived messages for more than a few months.
- Newsfeeds
- Paid newsgroup service which seems a bit on the expensive side to
me. Their unlimited bandwidth plan is about $40 a month. They host
binary newsgroups (in fact they claim this is their specialty) and at
that price they had better be good.
- Newsguy
- Another paid newsgroup service which is not very expensive. At the
basic rate you can download 10mb per day.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.
