Re: OT: Is NovaBBS Down for Others?!

Ian J. Ball <ijball@mac.invalid> wrote:

7/15/25 10:01 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Ian J. Ball <ijball@mac.invalid> wrote:

So, because of the annoying firewall they use at my (soon-to-be-ending)
second job, I can't access Usenet thru ES (or using Thunderbird) when
I'm there.

So I've been using NovaBBS instead, which is a web-based front end for
usenet (like Google Groups used to be, before GG when bad, and then...
died).

Anyway, over about the past week or two, I increasingly couldn't access
RAT via NovaBBS when I tried:

https://www.novabbs.com/arts/thread.php?group=rec.arts.tv

I get a "Error: The connection to the Message Server failed." and "No
article available" error messages.

And when I try other random groups they have in the "arts" listings, I
usually get the same thing.

Can anyone else confirm if they are seeing the same thing when the click
on the RAT link above?

(Trying to figure out if NovaBBS is really down, or if I just need to
clear my cache or something... Thanks.)

Thom Miller died in May. No one is administering it.

OK, well that would explain it. Thanks for the response.

Too bad no one stepped up to take it over. It doesn't seem like the kind
of thing that would be hard to keep up.

I vaguely recall that he said he wasn't feeling well, then his wife
announced that he had died of pancreatic cancer. That's pretty much the
most horrid cancer of all as there is no early detection and even if
there were, it's the most invasive surgery of all as the pancreas is
behind other organs in the abdomen and those qualified for the surgery
have a 30% survival rate with a very long recovery. Once you're
diagnosed it's already Stage IV and you've got weeks to live. If you're
ever told that this surgery is your only hope for survival, you are
going to want to choose death.

Needless to say, he had no succession plan for the News server and
associated Web interface. It's too late to work on a succession plan
once you receive this prognosis.

Someone else announced days ago that he's further developing the rslight
software and it's available to users. It's sort of a test platform.

There is an unrelated Web interface, newsgrouper.

Anyway, it looks like I am now out of options to read usenet when I am
at my second job. It's a good thing that that job is very likely
wrapping up for good for me in August.

Do you have a shell account anywhere? Traditionally, one downloads PuTTY
onto a stick because ports aren't always blocked. PuTTY is a tiny
application for secure remote access to shell accounts. It's my daily
go-to program.