A forlorn landscape?

Almost. On rare occassions, the odd switch job rumbles through.

Seems a shame. Even though a lot of ISPs don't carry newsgroups any more,the rec.woodworking group still shows 25-100 posts a day. Of course, when it gets to 100 or more, they're mostly talking politics :-).

Very good metaphor. Sadly, almost all newsgroups are going quite comatose. I found them more easily accessable and stable than 'blogs'.

In message , gareth writes

Disused? No. A backwater? Well, perhaps. But look on the bright side

- at least this NG has not become a haven for 'tinned luncheon meat', unlike so many newsgroups.

There are still a few fairly busy traditional NGs, although not many new faces these days. Those that do appear seem to stumble upon Usenet via Google Groups, without really realising where they are.

My ISP (Bell Canada) was one of the first to shut down its UseNet server. So I went to an independent, Newshosting. $10/month, I think there's a limit on downloads, but I've never reached. There are free UseNet services, too, but in my experience they're flaky.

In another group, someone said that some ISP's block or throttle NNTP (UseNet) traffic, which IMO is illegal.

Have a good day,

I'm still subscribed, because occasionally somebody posts something useful, often a question for the more experienced modellers.

But most of my on-line model railway activity is through specialist email groups on Yahoo like the 7mm (O-Scale), GWR, early rail (mostly American) and small layout design groups.

I prefer Usenet and email because otherwise you have to log onto lots of diggerent individual web forums which is much less convenient.

Probably not worth changing for you, but I've been probably a decade with newsguy.com and they always have been $60.00 for a year.

Giganews is $4.99/month == $59.88/year.

Eternal September, based in Germany, what I use is $0 per month, adding up to $0 per year.

(Just sign up!)