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

--
Andrzej (Andre) Matuch
TG: @AndrzejMatuch
Catholic, paleoconservative, Christ is king.

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.

On 2024-05-05 10:10 a.m., DFS wrote:
> 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.

I'm going to open up another ticket with them mentioning the issues you
listed above. I had problems but couldn't prove it was on their end.
Since you have done a good job of explaining the issues, I'll just sent
it over and hope that they fix it.

--
Andrzej (Andre) Matuch
TG: @AndrzejMatuch
Catholic, paleoconservative, Christ is king.

On 5/5/2024 12:13 PM, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
> On 2024-05-05 10:10 a.m., DFS wrote:

<snip>

> I'm going to open up another ticket with them mentioning the issues you
> listed above. I had problems but couldn't prove it was on their end.
> Since you have done a good job of explaining the issues, I'll just sent
> it over and hope that they fix it.

And just like that, BN is working well. I just submitted a post and a
few seconds later it's available in BetterBird.

It won't last in my experience.

On 2024-05-05 3:20 p.m., DFS wrote:
> On 5/5/2024 12:13 PM, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>> On 2024-05-05 10:10 a.m., DFS wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> I'm going to open up another ticket with them mentioning the issues
>> you listed above. I had problems but couldn't prove it was on their
>> end. Since you have done a good job of explaining the issues, I'll
>> just sent it over and hope that they fix it.
>
>
> And just like that, BN is working well.  I just submitted a post and a
> few seconds later it's available in BetterBird.
>
> It won't last in my experience.

It's not fixed on my end yet, but it looks like they're working on it.

--
Andrzej (Andre) Matuch
TG: @AndrzejMatuch
Catholic, paleoconservative, Christ is king.