Sonic.net

Thanks to Kelsey and the group at Sonic for keeping usenet alive here for so long.

Usenet and email were my first introduction to the internet. They are still the internet to me.

--paul

Okay, actually, I gave up and flushed all of the overviews on the reader. I wrote some code to track down all of the corrupted overviews but it was going to take probably most of a day to run - meanwhile, server forks were segfaulting all over the place.

sonic.* groups really are gone now

So usenet will no longer be available through Sonic? Wasn't there once a link to another usenet service?

I would be very sad to see news.sonic.net disappear. I do not care much about alt.* or binary groups, but I find the comp.* groups very valuable.

Usenet is a great resource and it is sad to see it fall by the wayside more every year, but I thought independent ISPs like Sonic would be here to keep the lights on. Hopefully there is some life left in the news cluster still, at least enough to keep the heart of text discussion on Usenet alive.

Thanks for keeping it running as long as you did. If this is it, I will miss it.

A sad day. Thank you for delaying the inevitable.

Some people have started using http://www.eternal-september.org. It has only text groups, but the price seems pretty reasonable. I'll be moving my usenet activities over there soon. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Sadly the competence of the people at sonic have enabled many of us to procrastinate a little too long.

See you all in september.

--paul
Sic transit gloria Usenet

coad wrote:Some people have started using http://www.eternal-september.org. It has only text groups, but the price seems pretty reasonable. I'll be moving my usenet activities over there soon. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Sadly the competence of the people at sonic have enabled many of us to procrastinate a little too long.

See you all in september.

--paul
Sic transit gloria Usenet

I finally bit the bullet and registered for an account on their news server, but I'm having trouble configuring Thunderbird for it. I know this isn't the right place to ask about it, but it's probably a real simple thing, I just can't figure, and I'm kinda stuck here. Basically, when I connect to it, it only asks me for a password, but not a username. I enter the password that I have registered with them, but it always comes back bad, likely because there's no username. I've checked the box that says "Always request authentication when connecting to this server" but that does not change anything.

Well, I'm sticking with Sonic's news server as long as Kelsey is willing to keep nursing it along. But I did test out a trn connection to Eternal-September several weeks ago when we had another near-death scare, so I'm ready to switch to that if needed. But I've confirmed that I can still post as well as read through news.sonic.net, so I'm okay for now.

BTW, in case some of you haven't discovered this yet, the article numbering got all kerfuffled when Kelsey had to start downloading new header information. So be sure to reset the numbering of your "read" articles. I've just been going through .newsrc and chopping off the last few digits of each line. Then I run trn and it gets populated with the postings that have come in since the system was wiped clean.

I need to go through my killfiles and do the same, as right now they're looking for higher numbers than the new articles have, so the filters aren't being run.

Patty

p.s. Dukeofur, I don't know of any better place on these forums to ask your question about configuring Thunderbird. I've seen similar questions here on the General forum previously.

If sonic's in-house server goes down for good, does that mean we wouldn't be able to connect to Supernews via sonic any longer?