Saturday, December 8, 2007

AOL And Usenet Newsgroups!

There was a time when AOL members had free access to most of the Usenet newsgroups.

In case you didn't know, Usenet newsgroups are message forums where you can post messages, questions and answer other peoples' messages.

But AOL has since cancelled this access to the newsgroups.

The alternative is to join the Google Groups where the access is free BUT you don't get access to the binary newsgroups where you can post pictures (and see / access them as well).

There are some free newsgroup servers out there but the list of them is ever-changing. Some of them are not reliable and some of them allow you to read the posts but you can't post to the newsgroup(s).

I'm currently investigating getting netscape access to the newsgroups. I had netscape a long time ago and remember being able to access some of the usenet newsgroups. The current version of netscape doesn't allow for access to the newsgroups so I had to download an older version of it which I did. Now I'm fooling around with the newsgroups that I have been able to subscibe to. In order to post to these newsgroups you need to have an email account. You can register with netscape to get an email account - which I am trying to do now but I keep getting cut off.

Of course there are newsgroup servers where you can pay to get access to the newsgroups too.