Sonic.net

A few years ago, Sonic dropped its internal support groups on Usenet and said we should post our questions here or send them directly to [email protected]. Are Sonic people still participating in these groups? A couple of weeks ago, there was a brief discussion about Sonic's newsservers:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3740

The only participants in the thread were two Sonic customers.

Since news.sonic.net is still only getting postings sporadically and supernews.sonic.net is still slow as molasses, a few days ago I sent a query to Sonic support. They said I should post about the problem in these forums. I said I had already done that but that we users can't fix server problems ourselves. It's not like I was asking about proper procmail syntax or something that another user would have the answer to.

I realize that Usenet is not Sonic's top priority, but if Sonic is going to have newsservers, shouldn't we be able to get some sort of support for them?

Hi! This thread has been talking about our news servers recently: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2381&start=10

Hmmm, I certainly wouldn't have thought to look for a discussion about Usenet in Sonic's "Internet access" forum.

Anyway...I guess that means that Sonic can't do anything to speed up the performance of Supernews? If we want a better Usenet feed, we'll have to get a subscription elsewhere?

patty1 wrote:Hmmm, I certainly wouldn't have thought to look for a discussion about Usenet in Sonic's "Internet access" forum.

Anyway...I guess that means that Sonic can't do anything to speed up the performance of Supernews? If we want a better Usenet feed, we'll have to get a subscription elsewhere?

Sorry, I didn't notice that topic was in the wrong forum area, and I've now moved it here.

Support staff cannot always address every question, so an item like the decision to end our Usenet service wouldn't be something they can address. That'd be me instead. Sorry for the slow responses, we were trying to work out if the platform could be saved.

Dane,

One of the theoretical advantages to USENET and "news" (news.sonic.net being an example) is that it is not centrally controlled. Theoretically, websites could censor or mold their content to their own liking. There is a danger that the once-free-expression USENET communities could be turned into a online reality of web sites in which expression is molded, censored, and not free at all.

Unfortunately, those theories have come to pass. In an age which Reddit, Twitter, Facebook & Google are some of our most used methods of social communication, ALL FOUR censor their posts, results, and other aspects of their services. I have just learned that Reddit does this too, and have known that Twitter, Facebook and Google have been doing this for some time. Even if for some reason you haven't been aware of this or have a different interpretation, the theory above is still pertinent.

In this situation, freedom of expression needs to have a new place. Theoretically, USENET has central elements to it, such as the cancel (and supersede) function(s), the newsgroups lists, the voting systems, the servers, their administrators, volume concerns of 100% feeds and selectivity problems with respect to freedom of expression, and practical limitations to USENET's resiliency in the sake of attacks against it. However, USENET still has the benefit that if you ignore CANCEL functions, anyone can post, and it doesn't get censored outright.

While I don't think Sonic.net, Sonic.Com, or Sonic's support for USENET and news.sonic.net is the only solution, what this means to me is that I would like the decision to either support or not to support USENET/news on Sonic to be made abundantly clear, so we know whether or not this element will be available on Sonic with some level of certainty, and so that those of us who are considering old or new methods of freedom of expression have awareness of what the landscape is, at least your little tiny part of it.

I appreciate your response that you are looking into this. Please do so, and answer. I would personally accept answers such as "we are going to repair it", "we are removing it entirely", and "we are going to string it along with lots of unrepaired parts just because we don't know if it is a good idea to remove it prematurely, and don't want to make the error of removing it if it should not be removed, but don't currently have the motivation to actually make it better". For the record, I don't know which answer is best in your case, and I'm not making fun of answer #3; I'd find that acceptable as well, if we knew that was what was going on.

Sincerely,
Brad Allen

FWIW, I vote to continue the Usenet service. Be that rebuilding, repairing or the external access. Please do not let Usenet die at Sonic.

qm wrote:I would personally accept answers such as "we are going to repair it", "we are removing it entirely", and "we are going to string it along with lots of unrepaired parts just because we don't know if it is a good idea to remove it prematurely, and don't want to make the error of removing it if it should not be removed, but don't currently have the motivation to actually make it better".

I believe Dane's replies have indicated his current thinking is they will let the system run until the hardware is no longer viable, at which time the service will be sunset.

How would ignoring cancel posts eliminate censorship? You can't force your upstream provider to do it so cancel posts can function as a form of censorship.

Now getting a 400 error. Looks like the connection limit is now zero.