Zen Internet Support Forum

I've just joined Zen, from a no longer available corporate account at Nildram now Pipex, that used Giganews.
I'm finding that some groups that were very active on Giganews are seemingly deserted on the Zen news server.
I've downloaded the list of groups from Zen via NewsRover get groups.
Is it possible that Zen doesn't carry some alt. groups and that although I'm subscribed to them, they don't exist on the Zen news server?
Is there a text list of Zen news groups so I can check if Zen carries the ones I'm interested in?
How can I establish if Zen carries the groups?

There is quite a disparity between the numbers of groups that "Zen" carry compared to a 'pay' news provider such as "Giganews".  My Zen newsgroup listing shows around 55,000 groups whilst my Giganews account shows over double that with a count of around 110,000.  Your best bet to find this info is to ask in the zen. groups that are carried on the news server as I don't think there is any listings of groups carried on the Zen website. 
 

AndyM77:

There is quite a disparity between the numbers of groups that "Zen" carry compared to a 'pay' news provider such as "Giganews".

That seems to be my problem. Nildram/Pipex were getting overwhelmed by the volume, so supplemented their in house news server with a Giganews feed, so there was news.nildram.co.uk and giganews.nildram.co.uk, both now resolve to the Europe Giganews server. And of course Giganews was free and part of the deal.

I'm regretting signing up with Zen as I don't need webspace or email accounts (I have several webmail ones including  Freeserve/Orange, Netscape, Hotmail, Gmail) only connectivity and newsgroups.

Zen seem to be reinventing the wheel, and giving an inferior news service in the process, it just doesn't make sense for every ISP to provide storage for all the newsgroups, when one or two servers can serve the world and provide a superior service.

I had assumed that the premium price compared with competing ISP's and special offers  would get a news  server  as good as  from Nildram/Pipex , obviously not. I even have some doubta about whether Zen is getting all the posts and full completion, as what were high volume groups now seem rather quiet.

 Another point is if Zen doesn't carry groups, they can't be found,  or selected in your news client, so you can lose out and not realise it.

 Many thanks for your reply.

I have been downloading *linux distros* from zens server for over a year but via nzb files from newzbin.com.
I have yet to have a single nzb download thats within zens 7 day retention fail due to the group not existing or the post not have propergated to zens server.

I believe that Zen dont carry alot of the smaller less populer groups or ones hardly used but they have all the major ones and completion for all the major ones seem to be 95%+

Blackmesa8

I just remembered something, in my last post i was talking purely about binary groups as thats all i use usenet for. I have a friend also on Zen and he's commented a few times that Zen's server seems to be missing and having completion problems on text groups. So if it's text groups your finding missing and questioning there completion rates then you could well be right. However my mate got around the problem by getting an acount from usenet-news.net He uses zen's server for binary downloads as like i said its very good for that. But usenet-news for text groups. Also it wont cost that much to use usenet-news for text groups cause they use so little bandwidth 10gb block for £2.50 ish should for text groups last you a year or so and they dont expire after a certain amount of time.

Blackmesa8

blackmesa8:

I have a friend also on Zen and he's commented a few times that Zen's server seems to be missing and having completion problems on text groups. So if it's text groups your finding missing and questioning there completion rates then you could well be right. However my mate got around the problem by getting an acount from usenet-news.net

Many thanks for that pointer, signed up for  usenet-news.net, things are looking better. I only want text groups, many  n/g binaries seem to be infected, so I go for Demonoid P2P, since I can see comments on the torrents,  their quality, if infected, etc. Bit irk'd at having to supplement Zen's server having experienced Nildrams GigaNews for free, but usenet-news.net isn't prohibitive in price.
 

zigmund:

AndyM77:

There is quite a disparity between the numbers of groups that "Zen" carry compared to a 'pay' news provider such as "Giganews".

That seems to be my problem. Nildram/Pipex were getting overwhelmed by the volume, so supplemented their in house news server with a Giganews feed, so there was news.nildram.co.uk and giganews.nildram.co.uk, both now resolve to the Europe Giganews server. And of course Giganews was free and part of the deal.

I'm regretting signing up with Zen as I don't need webspace or email accounts (I have several webmail ones including  Freeserve/Orange, Netscape, Hotmail, Gmail) only connectivity and newsgroups.

Zen seem to be reinventing the wheel, and giving an inferior news service in the process, it just doesn't make sense for every ISP to provide storage for all the newsgroups, when one or two servers can serve the world and provide a superior service.

I had assumed that the premium price compared with competing ISP's and special offers  would get a news  server  as good as  from Nildram/Pipex , obviously not. I even have some doubta about whether Zen is getting all the posts and full completion, as what were high volume groups now seem rather quiet.

 Another point is if Zen doesn't carry groups, they can't be found,  or selected in your news client, so you can lose out and not realise it.

 Many thanks for your reply.

 

Before criticising Zen news server you might care to consider that Pipex/Nildram "choke" their nntp sevice to 30 KB/s, I generally get over 10 times that transfer rate from zen news server.

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