I spent quite a while checking out the free servers but couldn't find any that allow posting and there seem to be questions of reliability, so, I started comparison-shopping among the most highly recommended pay services.

Under the assumption that our usage won't need as much download-allowance as the average usenet user downloading gig after gig of warez and pron, I decided that the best option was to buy 25gigs, non-expiring, from http://www.news.astraweb.com/ for a once-off payment of $10.

So far, the intensive initial sent up (involving downloading 10,000+ posts stretching back a month or so) and few days of updating, has used up about 6k of my 25G. At this rate, that $10 should cover me for several years!

One important thing to note is that I haven't actually experimented with posting although I can confirm that their server is sending back headers indicating that my account is allowed to post.

Posts on my forums have been sucessful and it's great to see my domain being picked up by google because of it :)

I use newshosting.com and it's $15 a month for unlimited bandwidth. If you use newhosting, you'll need to enable posting via their online CP but after that, it works a treat.

Good luck.

Interesting, how did you realize that google had picked you up? Do you use some sort of tool to check your google-ranking?

They were one of the companies I heard good things about, I think it was down to them, Giganews and a handful of others. If I was also using Usenet to download binaries etc I would probably consider an unlimited monthly account but, for NNTP Gateway alone, I think a one-off payment of $10 is enough.

These one-off accounts are also said to be pretty handy as a "fill-in" server, for when a few parts of something you're trying to download from your unlimited server are missing.

is this addon working fine ?
i have vb 3.0.7 installed, will upgrade today, need to confirm if there are any problems with 3.5 version in advance ?

thank you

Hello!

My bord is in Japanese, and using S_JIS encoding,
and I can use original vbllutein,
but can not your module.

Would you please give advice for using this module in Japanese?

I was all set to go with this until I saw "personal use only" in the terms of service.

I've got to do something. My freebie dried up:
Gateway version 2.3.2 2 group(s) gatewayed.
Could not connect to NNTP-server. (Connection refused (111))

Oh c'mon, that's just standard contract copperplate, doesn't mean anything other than they'd prefer you not to run your own ISP off any of their accounts. With an account of this kind, downloading miniscule amounts of text-only posts, you are, literally, the least of their worries.

For God's sake, we're talking about $10!!! If, in a sudden fit of insanity, Astraweb decide to mobilise their legal department, go elsewhere.

BTW, I'm astonished that you bothered to read the terms of service, what's the point? Isn't your time worth anything?

Yikes! Sorry I violated internet protocol by reading a terms of service page. :o

Question: on a particular newsgroup, are message numbers the same on ALL providers? In other words, without changing the "last message number" The board should pick up again where it left off?

No, numbering depends on the retention of each service: the first first (free but no-posting) service I used had 10,000+ posts for a particular newsgroup whereas the second (paid and posting-allowed) only had 1,000+.

I cheated by changing the "start from" number to 1000, probably causing some overlap but the aim, successfully achieved, was to keep the 10,000 posts but continue to add new posts via the paid, posting-allowed service.