Looking for Guest Bloggers

We’ve decided to open up our blog to a few guest bloggers. If you are interested in doing some writing and are a usenet user then we’d love to hear from you. Just contact us and tell us what you’d like to write about.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The NewsgroupDirect Team

New and Improved Free Trial

We’ve decided to make some changes to our free trial process. Our old free trial was for 14 days and 1 GB of usage. That system worked great, as it gave our users plenty of time to decide if our service was right for them, but the 1 GB usage limit caused a lot of customers to leave their free trial quicker than they anticipated. To improve that and to insure that we’re giving our customers as much information about our service as possible we’ve decided to change the free trial terms to 7 days and 15 GB of usage. The increased usage should allow our newest users to see how fast and reliable our servers are as well as the quality of our retention and completion.

We hope that you enjoy this new and improved free trial process. We believe that it will benefit our newest customers greatly.

Website Maintenance Tonight (UPDATED)

NewsgroupDirect.com will be unavailable tonight from 9 PM EST until 11 PM EST. We are going to be migrating the website to new servers and upgrading database configurations.

The usenet servers will not be affected by this downtime and will be available normally. The NGD helpdesk will also still be available.

Contact our support team with any questions or concerns.

UPDATE: Maintenance has been rescheduled for 9AM – 11AM EST July 5.

Announcing Our Partnership with StorageNinja

We are extremely excited to be able to offer a great new benefit to our users. NewsgroupDirect has partnered with StorageNinja, the online storage and backup service, to provide 30 GB of online storage for our new Unlimited account users. 30 GB of online storage and backup provides our users a secure, reliable way to backup their most critical files. It’s more important than ever to keep a backup of your critical files, and StorageNinja makes it easy. We recommend that you use your StorageNinja account to backup your personal documents and any other files that are critical to you.

We hope that you enjoy this great new benefit. NewsgroupDirect continues to innovate and provide the best benefits for our customers. We are passionate about providing our customers the best experience in usenet.

Details: StorageNinja will be automatically provided for any new Unlimited (monthly or yearly) accounts created on or after June 20, 2010. You will receive an email from StorageNinja with your account details after you register with NewsgroupDirect. At this time, only new Unlimited accounts will be given StorageNinja access. Any issues with your StorageNinja account should be directed to support.storageninja.com.

Group Spotlight: Newsgroups for Legal Questions

An interesting collection of newsgroups that we carry is the legal groups. These are text groups that should not be overlooked when looking for answers to legal questions.

Law related newsgroups have users seeking for answers on some questions about law practices and other legal needs. Often, the discussions on newsgroups are categorized and this can surely help the users to find answers on their search. If you cannot find any discussions about your legal concern then you are free to start one; just make sure that it is in law-related newsgroup or it can be deleted by the administrators as off-topic or spam. Most administrators who establish and maintain legal related newsgroups are academic or professional institutions.

Usenet Court Tips

An example of a law related discussion is about competition law. Since this involves different perspectives on the participation of consumers and entrepreneurs on market economy, it is a must to know the ideas of other professionals on the different approaches that are available. You can really consider these groups as one of the largest legal resources available as it provides links on different research materials as well. Imagine getting this huge amount of materials on antitrust and trade regulations.

Newsgroup Retention Now at 600 Days!

We’re pleased to announce that our binary retention is now at 600 days! Our retention has been growing daily for months, and we?re continuing to set new records daily.

Binary Retention Details:
600 Days available through message-id
Over 300 Days available through header downloads
Varies by Newsgroup

Text Retention:
Approximately 1400 days
Varies by newsgroup

50 Connections Now Available!

We’re excited to announce that we are now able to offer our customers 50 concurrent connections. NewsgroupDirect continues to invest in our infrastructure as a part of our commitment to having the best service in the industry.

How Will This Affect You?
We are providing these upgrades to our customers free of charge. So if your account previously had 20 connections you will now have 50 connections. If your account previously had 10 connections you will now have 20. The number of concurrent connections allowed determines the number of articles that you are allowed to fetch at a time. So, theoretically, having more connections will allow you to download more simultaneously, increasing your total throughput.

NewsgroupDirect, the Usenet Company, is America’s premier usenet provider, providing access to more than 100,000 usenet newsgroups.

10 Ways to Get Effective Answers to Your Post

Have you ever posted a question or comment, only to find that you?re not getting any feedback what so ever?

NewsgroupDirect has 10 great tips to get the most from your post and your question answered fast:

  1. Stick to the topic: Each day the internet is becoming saturated with useless information. Anyone looking to speak their mind can online. The problem arrives when done in an unstructured way, making finding information fruitless. Each newsgroup has a particular subject matter, stick to that subject and don?t start rambling on about irrelevant things.
  2. Ask for help in a smart way: When asking for help, don?t make it too hard or too unrewarding to help you, and don?t annoy the people responding. Your English doesn?t have to be perfect. But long paragraphs and ?kewl? spellings make you harder to read, which makes it less likely someone will answer.
  3. DON?T YELL! Posting in ALL CAPS is the written equivalent of shouting, and many people consider it very rude.
  4. Give specifics: Make sure to give all specifics upfront. If the reader has to ask a question, they?ll probably just move on.
  5. Receive answers polity: If you ask it in the group, read it in the group; you will antagonize people if you ask for answers in e-mail. This also keeps the answers from others interested. And make sure to check and respond regularly to the suggestions left. If you post and never return, people will remember and not bother with you next time. If you find the answer yourself, make sure to post it for everyone else.
  6. Post in plain text: Don?t post pictures, HTML or other binaries. If you need people to see a picture, post the URL.
  7. First, try to find the answer yourself: The easiest way to make people not respond is to ask the same newbie question as everyone else. Check the newsgroup?s FAQs before you post.
  8. Post an article once and wait to post again: ?My question is urgent. It?s been two whole hours and nobody has responded. Maybe they didn?t see it. I?ll just post it again.? or ?I don?t see my article in the newsgroup. It must not have gone through. I?ll post it again just in case.? Usenet is not e-mail, it takes time for articles to reach all the servers. Hard as it may be to be patient, wait at least a couple of days. And then, put the notation ?(REPOST)? in the subject.
  9. Crosspost, don?t multipost: You should always post in the newsgroup that best fits your topic. However, when the article genuinely fits multiple groups, crosspost, don?t multipost. And don?t post an article to an irrelevant group just because you hang out there, or because your message is so important that everyone should see it.
  10. Quote it right: The principles are easy: put your comment after what you?re commenting on, quote just what is necessary and keep track of who said what.

Most people can only spend a few minutes at a time in these newsgroups, they don?t have to waste it trying to decipher cryptic or rude messages.