The "new" news service at Sympatico

[Paul King]

On 13 Jun 2006 at 13:27, Mel Wilson spaketh these wourdes:

> Scott Allen wrote:
> > On Tue Jun 13,2006 06:13:55 AM Paul King wrote:
> >> I was just wondering if anyone who is on Sympatico heard about
> >> them using a new news-hosting service. 
> [ ... ]
> >> Does it suck as much as the original Sympatico service did?
> > What sucked about it? I never had a problem. However, I just pull all 
> > the latest articles, daily, from the groups I read, to a local spool. I 
> > then read offline when I have the time.
> 
> "Sucked" is kind of extreme.  Completeness was spotty, both 

I think it is entirely appropriate. For the 4-part FAQ I posted, completeness 
was 100% lousy, and the newsgroup was spam-riddled, comparing with a German 
freenet server I used to use out of desparation (until it became a commercial 
service), there was no attempt to so much as lift a finger to manage the 
USENET server. The newsgroup sympatico.highspeed was full of people who 
complained and equally full of Sympatico Tech Support people who evaded 
questions and obfuscated what everyone could obviously see was the case: that
Sympatico had no intention of managing USENET, and didn't care what anyone 
thought.

Ever post an article to news.answers? Now, you can't just do it off the bat, 
because it is moderated by people at rtfm.mit.edu. FAQs posted to news.answers 
span all newsgroups, and to get your FAQ posted to news.answers, it has to be 
approved at rtfm. I got mine approved at rtfm. 

FAQs approved at rtfm, even multipart ones, would meet or exceed standards set by 
any USENET site. Most USENET site admins would find it unthinkable to NOT include 
the collection of FAQs posted to news.answers. However, Sympatico seems to think 
that omitting several parts of multipart TEXT postings to news.answers is an OK 
thing to do. By extension then, they also get omitted when posting them to the 
newsgroups they were written for. Of the four parts of my FAQ I have written only 
one ever makes it through to Sympatico -- the part where I list the changes and 
additions. That is, the entire rest of the FAQ -- or really, the FAQ itself -- is 
missing. When I logged on to the German freenet server, they are all there.

I have given up complaining to them, and I have been told they were "looking into 
it". They have been telling everyone that ever since they got into the business 
over 10 years ago. In retrospect, they were probably saying that because they 
were too polite to tell their customers to stop hounding them.

> for posts and groups (it didn't carry comp.risks, for 
> example.)  Reading on-line you could find the server going 
> cataleptic for the odd few minutes, every once in a while.
> 

All USENET servers will miss entire newsgroups (nobody wants to carry groups that 
no one reads), and they will add them if you ask. But if you ever comapred 
Sympatico with even the cheapest server out there (such as  the Free servers I 
used), Sympatico's completion WITHIN newsgroups was pathetic even compared with a 
free server! Not only would multipart posts be missing but scores of single-posts 
also. In its place was a huge amount of spam that were nearly absent on the 
freenet server. This can only be partially explained off in terms of the nature 
of message propagation in a USENET system. But I have noticed that this is a 
problem not only for sci.bio.food-science (my NG), but really all established 
newsgroups in the "Big 7" that I have seen.

> Worst is the new basic service doesn't allow posting.  I 
> have an email in asking what the extended service costs, 
> before I click "activate", but I've got no answer yet.

Just check the bell newshosting site:
   https://controlpanel.newshosting.com/newssignup/signup/?r=91809
for a price structure.

Warning: the only news reader they recommend is Outlook Express. The free service 
failed on my copies of Agent and PAN.  

Regards 

Paul King

> 
> 	Cheers,        Mel.
> 
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