Peter D Bakija <pd...@lightlink.com> writes:
> Right, so last weekend, I got my news.motzarella.org news server
> working. And now we are alerted that they are switching to
> news.eternal-september.org (which sounds like a creepy fundamentalist
> cult...).
http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html
"All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet
used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any
sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided
with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and
plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These
relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few
months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet,
nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those
who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable
decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal
September. See also AOL!."
> So I reconfigured by newsreader to operate off that, and it
> isn't working. Anyone successfully connect to the new server yet?
I tried switching just now, and found out that eternal-september.org has a
different numbering scheme for posts than motzarella.org.
So if your newsreader has a list of read and unread posts stored in
.newsrc-file or whatever, it goes completely out of whack. You need to
destroy the file (or whatever) and let your newsreader generate a new one.
Unfortunately, you'll lose your tally of read and unread posts, so do it
after you have read everything you want to read.
Meanwhile, motzarella.org still functions.
HG