Re: OT: Blocknews problematic with comp.os.linux.advocacy

On 5/5/2024 8:09 AM, Andrzej Matuch wrote:

To anyone using Blocknews, are you having issues with comp.os.linux.advocacy? It works well with Eternal September.

issues galore since Jan/Feb.
For years BN was great: fast, cheap and reliable.  And good tech support.  Earlier this year they moved to new server(s), and screwed everything up.
* connections are now flaky.  python code I ran for years suddenly got very slow or froze.
* using Thunderbird/Betterbird, all of a sudden clicking on a message won't download the body.  Go to the next one and it downloads, but the previous one is permanently stuck and absolutely will not download, unless you restart the client and try again.
* messages I posted used to show up as new in 2-3 seconds.  Now sometimes they won't show up for 10 minutes.
* they renumbered all their articles; cola used to start with 2, now it starts with 899518, and the new numbering overlaps with the old numbers.   And now there are huge gaps in the numbering - sometimes 20 or 30 numbers in a row will say 'Article not found'.
* I found dupes in the 2 groups I looked at (cola and comp.lang.c): the same messageID but two different article numbers.   This is a huge no-no.
* issuing .xover commands sometimes returns a blank xref header (xref lists the groups the message was posted/crossposted to).
These BN issues are probably the same for all groups, but we (I at least) spend most of our time on cola so we see more problems here.
But it's still fast to download messages off BN compared to eternal-september.  And blocknews is one of the few that sells cheap blocks of downloads.  Most Usenet services want a monthly subscription; I paid $10 for 50GB on Blocknews and used about 1/3 of it in 5 years.