(A boring dissertation).
Many ISPs offer newsgroups (check their faqs for "Usenet") - but they usually fall into 3 catagories :
1) Run their own servers, which have lots of incomplete parts & probably missing groups.
2) Give their users some number of Gigs from a premium newsserver. (Usually 1 Gig / month - not enough to get you anywhere).
3) Give their users access to a crappy sub-premium newsserver (missing groups, missing parts, erratic performance).
Roadrunner cable used to do #1, pretty well, dunno if they still do. And they did it fast. Made me want to move to their region.
In the #1 & #3 cases, you'd pay for a limited account on a good server, and get the missing pieces from there. Astraweb is a favorite.
Then of course, there's the ISPs that don't give you any.
Newshosting is a great server for $10 a month, unlimited gigs. About 30 or 40 days retention, last I checked. A month of Easynews, at $10 a month for several Gigs (10?) (and the unused Gigs roll over) is a great way to learn the lay of the land - because they have a web server. Giganews holds onto stuff for about 90 days (if you have a good memory for what you want), but unlimited is closer to $25.
The alternatives?
A new alternative to newsgroups is Rapidshare, where fanedits & stuff are currently going up at a great pace. If that trend keeps expanding, it'll really be something. That's about $9 or 9 Pounds, I forget. I'm gonna go on there for a month or three.
And there's trading. Maybe $10 a month postage...
Torrents are great, if you have plenty of upload bandwidth. Perfect for folks living at college - their internet is free, $10 a month is hard to justify, and the upload is insanely fast. Youth at home, with little or no income, favor the torrent thing too. And, heck, anyone with a budget and some patience. (I have a budget, but no patience).
But for folks paying $50 a month for broadband, (on top of their Cable/Sattelite bill), and only getting 30 or 40 kBs upload, versus their several-100's kBs download, another $10 for newsgroups can sound pretty attractive...
Why newsgroups?
There's tons of almost everything on the newsgroups. But it's only good for fanedits/preservations if people upload the goodies there... which brings us back to the topic. Segaflip used to post a dvd a day. Mostly SW. Life was good. Sigh.
We've still got posters for SW, and I'm starting up with the non-SW fanedits (many of which I'll get at Rapidshare). But it's still pretty thin in the SW group, compared to what we were used to.
Of course a whole lot of SW was movie LD transfers, which aren't in as much demand as before the GOUT (until X0 comes out). New stuff is coming in, but most of the SW would be reposts. But hey, it's been long enough that reposts would be welcomed. (I wont do reposts until I run out of new stuff. But if a new SW comes my way, I'll be happy to post it).
Thanks to MoveAlong, I just got Puggo's SW and ESB in an hour, instead of 3 or 20 days. And I didn't have to upload a thing. I love newsgroups! (I upload voluntarily, but I'm uploading something different each time, unlike when I upload to torrents).