<fos@sdf.org> wrote:

> you seem to see the diminishment of Usenet services by ISPs as a result
> of a crusade against child porn.

Did you receive the letter that AT&T sent to all its cable customers
when they killed their NNTP servers? I did. I received that letter.

It was bullshit. Pure political bullshit. Stupid people believed it.
Oh, AT&T. They care so much for the kiddies. They're saving them.

They "teamed up" with the NY sleazebag Cuomo trying to make a name for
himself as "a good guy with simple solutions" to very complex problems.

If you ask me why they teamed up with that NY sleazebag Cuomo, I suspect
you already know that answer based on what you wrote below, in fact.

> i think it had far more to do with broadband allowing for increased
> volume of bandwidth thus network, hardware, and administrative costs of
> hosting news servers significantly went up and fast and the child porn
> issue was merely a convenient excuse of ISPs to shut them down and
> save money.

I agree. You could actually tell, in those days, how little they supported
NNTP servers because their instructions came with POP3/IMAP4 setup
instructions, but you had to call and go up a few support levels to get
their NNTP server setups.

I'm not an employee of a cable company but I suspect they inherited the
NNTP setup just as they inherited the POP3/IMAP4 setup, and they weren't
expecting the explosion in NNTP data, particularly I guess in binaries.

I don't actually know much about their business model, but what I did know
at the time was that dropping _all_ of Usenet was too simple of a solution.

>> You don't see that as a phony issue?
>
> No.

Whenever you see a politician (or a company, as in the case of AT&T),
propose a too-simple solution to a rather complex problem, there's a good
chance there's a _lot_ more to the issue than they are pretending it to be.

You can use Prohibition, as one (currently non-contentious) example, but
let's not stray too far into politics since the topic is free news servers.

I can't get Rocksolid to work even though they gave me credentials.
I tried every news server setting proposed so far in this newsgroup.
rocksolidbbs.com:119
rocksolidbbs.com:563
news.novabbs.org:119
news.novabbs.org:563

None work for me.
(login/password supplied by <admin@rocksolidbbs.com> RetroBBS Registration)

Do any of those server:port combinations work at all for you?

To: badgolferman
Re: Re: Can't post to rocksolid NNTP - where to get help?
By: badgolferman to alt.free.newsservers,news.admin.peering,news.software.nntp,alt.bbs on Tue Mar 07 2023 04:57 pm

>> volume of bandwidth thus network, hardware, and administrative costs
>> of hosting news servers significantly went up and fast and the child
>> porn issue was merely a convenient excuse of ISPs to shut them down
>> and save money.

Back in the early 2000s, my ISP switched from running their own news servers to contracting to a third party for news services. They then adopted the "if we make our news service bad enough, maybe they'll go away...". I'd call about a credit after their 3rd party news server was unavailable for a week, and was told that News was a "free service" offered to their customers and no refunds would be available.

Shortly after that, they just dropped news service. I don't know if this was after Google integrated usenet into Google Groups, but I bet that was the last straw for any ISP that hosted news.
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