Do you have a copy of the email you submitted? All of these are tracked, ticketed and logged in our system to ensure a timely response. Please send me this email via email and I will be able to explain this to you. If you do not, please send me more information- what account you submitted this from (email address), were you using Giganews through your ISP or were you a GN Consumer direct? If the later, what was your GN Account #?

Let me know, thanks.

Happy Saturday,
Liz

Off-Topic Posting
Nearly every newsgroup has a stated topic or acceptable range of topics for posting or discussion. Blatant disregard of the intended subject matter in a newsgroup will be treated as abusive posting. Posting off topic material in large volume or with apparent malicious intent will lead to immediate account termination.

Each time he posted another off-topic movie, he was reported, including the full headers of his post (one example part for each 700MB post, I didn’t think Giganews would want me to send hundreds of headers). I don’t know how much more blatant his abuse could have been. He clearly stated that he was going to post large volumes of off-topic material to the group in order to ruin it for others and then he did exactly that. From the time he first started, it took at least two weeks before his account was terminated, by which time he’d posted at least a dozen movies, if not more. I assume his account was terminated, I never received any response at all from Giganews, not even an automated acknowledgement of my reports. He just started posting from a different service one day.

Why did it take Giganews two weeks to terminate the account of someone who was openly posting off-topic 700MB movies in a self-proclaimed attempt to destroy a specific newsgroup?

When I used to ask Jeremy or Andrew why something was done the way it was, they either explained it in clear, concise detail (most of the time), or they stated that it was against corporate policy to discuss it (some of the time). I’m sorry, but your answers are vague and don’t actually explain anything. So yes, marketing double-speak.

“On our Architecture and costs I have clearly said all I can say”

Translation: Giganews doesn’t want its employees actually explaining why it does things the way it does.

@ReadersWrite- Wowsa, marketing double speak? That is a first Have I truly gone to the dark side? Having come from Hosted Ops and grown wise in a Datacenter and on grave yard shifts, I know what that means…no flame wars for me. I am happy to discuss with you live, email me and we can set up a time to talk. On our Architecture and costs I have clearly said all I can say, I want to keep my job- as you can tell I kinda like it and might be a little pumped about what is happening daily here.

For All: Thanks for welcoming me to the board and the lively dialogue- I will be a fixture

“@Reader I am confused on how you are tying my response on the Reseller question to the question on the ISP requirements and in all honesty I would consider neither of the decisions based on Marketing- but I think we might just have to agree to disagree. I’d rather be happy then be right”

The “reseller question” started out by stating that the “question” had already been asked, but that you hadn’t answered it, so they were asking it again. Since the term “reseller” had not been used in this thread up until that point, I assumed the poster of that message to be equating ISPs with resellers, even if they technically aren’t resellers.

Frankly, and I’m sorry if this offends you, your answers seem like typical PR doublespeak to me. In response to my question, you wrote;

“Transit Fees (people who access the later files do download more), business exposure, & political pressure feed into the equation heavily.
The way we have it set up is cost effective.”

However, you really did not explain how any of those relate to giving ISPs shorter retention times. Let’s take each one, one at a time;

“Transit fees” – The current volume of binary posting to Usenet is such that nobody could effectively download everything that’s posted each day. For most users in America, they could already download 24/7. Not to mention that if a user can’t download something that was posted 240 days ago, they’ll either get it from another provider, as I did, or they will download something else instead. Or they will get it from the P2P networks. In any case, the shorter retention time doesn’t offer any bandwidth savings to the ISP. Additionally, since the longer retention is mostly only used for downloading specific things that you didn’t realize you wanted or didn’t know were posted at the time they were new, older posts don’t get downloaded as much as newer stuff. The argument that a few extra months of retention would cost the ISPs in more bandwidth usage just doesn’t hold up.

“business exposure” – Whose? If you mean Giganews, how does giving ISPs, what amounts to an inferior version of your service, provide good exposure for Giganews? People will assume that since they only get 220 days of retention, that the 300+ days is just hype, or that the servers are unreliable and will look at other services when deciding on a personal account.

“political pressure” – Political pressure??? How does a difference of about 80 days of retention make a difference to anyone in any kind of position of authority? Who would say “300 days of retention!!! That’s completely unacceptable! Cut your retention to ISPs down to at least 220 days!” Objectionable content is posted every day. What possible political reason would make content up to 220 days acceptable, but content older than that is unacceptable?

You claim it’s “cost effective” but you have yet to clearly explain exactly how providing increased retention to ISPs would make providing them with Usenet service NOT cost effective, other than the vague argument that a shorter retention magically makes people download less. You haven’t elaborated on the other excuses you mentioned at all.

Why is it so hard to get straight, definitive answers out of any company? What is the political pressure that you speak of? What were the terms of this pressure? How did this pressure affect Giganews’s decision about ISP retention? How is running two sets of servers with different retention times “cost effective” for Giganews?

If you’re not allowed to answer such questions or you don’t know the answers, then please say so. Right now, your answers just come off as evasive.

Giganews might be the fastest provider on average, but it’s apparently not the fastest in many reported instances. Users in Southern California have reported that Astraweb is significantly faster than Giganews. A few users in Europe have also reported similar results with the Amsterdam servers. This is presumably using raw, not customized routing. As speed naturally depends on the actual routing involved, Giganews may end up being slightly faster or slower than other providers from any given location.

The term “most secure service” might benefit from a more exacting definition. If this refers to encryption, is Giganews somehow more secure than other 256bit SSL providers?

As far as service issues, I started my career at a hosted service provider whose software was thrown together and run in the dotcom boom on expensive EMCs and Veritas Software- I spent many sleepless nights with irate customers who had lost data. I made a vow at that point to always work for people who knew their stuff with operations teams who were tight and efficient and always improving. Next came SuperNews, a stellar group of guys who ran a tight ship but were not invested in.

Been very impressed at Giganews from the bottom up, technology, operations, support and a tight and smart executive team.

The rest of ya’ll the minute Britney Spears enters a thread I tend to leave, for you I will make an exception- and did you have to add Miley into the equation ?

For unexplained reasons, Giganews is the only major NSP that does not have one. This would save users a lot of time and aggravation in figuring out why they are experiencing problems.

Case in point: around the beginning of the year, posts made to Giganews were not showing up, and users had no way of knowing that this was a system-wide problem at Giganews that had been ongoing for many weeks.

Incidentally, this was happening around the same time that Giganews’ actual retention was under 200 days, while the website continued to state (week after week) that retention was 240 days.

Although Giganews has generally had less frequent problems than the average usenet provider, Giganews’ decision to NOT announce ongoing technical issues only serves to exasperate users when problems arise.

A little more transparency would be a welcome change.

the MAFIAA should be worried, we have a content distribution network that is unorganized, yet vastly outdoes everything they could possibly imagine. imagine if we actually organized…

mebbe the asshats DO have a clue about how incredibly diverse the p2p world really is, and realize there is no competing with it. im working on owning copies of everything i want for my library.

i get goosebumps every time i get something that pisses Mitch off, without paying for it.

How about Dizzie in Havana? And Miles?And Chick Corea? John Mayall? Or Jimi Hendrix? Yo-Yo Ma? Stan Getz? Blood, Sweat & Tears. And and …..

They’re all online. And then some. =)

Cheers!

Clitney Spears, u know the talentless lipsyncing whore, that when diminished, revitalizes itself with head shaving, child abuse, or lesbian tendencies to try and ‘re-invent’ her popularity, the mouseketeer that eventually will show her tits to save her ’significance’ singing (if you can call it that) prewritten cookie cutter obsolescent crap.. or at least until the MAFIAA can introduce the next underage sex pedophilic icon with no talent…

, oh wait, they did with Mylie Cyrus, and Hanna Montana.

ill stick to Ray Charles and the Beatles….

I hope your turning over in your grave Jack Valenti.., ive sneakernet’ed the Beatles Black Box in FLAC to wear out a 500 spindle of CDs.

stw, im on a roll tonight, w00t.

Cheers!

now THATS a fucking crime.

And I have a HUGE collection of Peter Gunn theme and Kingsmen Louie Louie covers.

heh

Cheers!

Just like the MAFIAA asshats do, we ‘buy’ once, and distribute forever. they probably owe US money…

we have one dude that has absolutely EVERYTHING the Grateful Dead ever released, and didnt release in digital format. and the asshats dont even offer old Grateful Dead shit online anywhere, they should be paying us for distribution. this is just one example of a community member ‘Sharing The Wealth’.

for dynamic file sharing, you have to get a community going, then you distribute the demand, joe gets Battlestar Galactica and Sarah Connor, fred gets 24 and TrueBlood, surfer gets the best and newest movies, etc, etc..

I have the benefit of building a community for years, so [we] get all the new stuff, and dont have to worry about ‘old’ stuff, cause someone already got it.

dont forget to buy alot of harddrives, i personally have over 5Tb online, which grows by ~250Gb/mo.

good luck and stw.

Thx,
Liz

To be honest, I’m thinking of dropping it and just going with Astrawab. I’m pay $9.95 a month, but I only get a top download speed of 80K/s. It used to be that it had the longer retention, but that’s no longer true (for me).

“Transit Fees (people who access the later files do download more), business exposure, & political pressure feed into the equation heavily.
The way we have it set up is cost effective.”

I’m suprised that LocalNet hasn’t dropped Usenet yet, especially as they’re based in New York, home of Andrew Cuomo, who pressured ISPs into dropping newsgroup access. I know, supposedly he only wanted them to drop a handfull of groups, but most dropped all Usenet access, or all the binary groups.

“Binary News Reaper 2- is that a good piece of software? That is one I have never tried.”

That depends on whether or not you’re willing to put up with its flakiness. The author seems to be long gone and the program has a mind of its own.

Good: Each part of a multi-part post is listed separately in the queue and each part will be saved to disk as soon as it’s downloaded (other programs wait until all the parts are downloaded to save the file), this means that no downloaded data is ever lost in the event of a crash or power failure. It also means that you can download just the first few parts of a file and then preview it. In a couple cases, I have downloaded just the few two parts to each Rar file in a 3GB set, used the command version of Rar to list the contents, then just downloaded the specific rar files I needed for the files I wanted. That can’t be done with most other programs. Also, not only will it download from multiple servers at once, if a part isn’t on one server or is corrupt, it will try to download that part from another server. Each connection can be connected or disconnected separately and specific posts/parts can be assigned to specific servers. It’s free.

Bad: If you close BNR2 with files still in the queue, when you next run it, some of the files won’t be downloaded. You have to delete them and re-load the NZB file, or re-select them. BNR2 is supposed to remember files you’ve already downloaded to avoid downloading them again (unless you tell it to), but this feature is very hit-or-miss. Often, if I need to reboot, I stop BNR2, delete everything from the queue, reboot, load the NZB file again, only to discover that all the previously downloaded parts are listed again. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Part 1 of each multi-part post will often be offset in the queue so that sorting the posts by subject moves all the part 1’s to the bottom of the list, but not all the time. Usually when you want it to do it, it doesn’t. The horizontal scroll bar doesn’t move smoothly, but rather it “jumps”. With long subject lines, it only seems to go so far, then it jumps to the end of the line showing the article ID. When using the mouse to scroll vertically in the queue, it sometimes switches to horizontal scrolling for no apparent reason, until you click in the queue window again. Occasionally, it will refuse to download anything at all. When this happens, you have to go into the BNR2 directory and delete all the files with a .BNR extension, except for “GrpLst.bnr”. Then run the program again. Also, the default display for browsing newsgroups directly looks like it was designed by a colorblind clown. Even after changing the colors, it’s still a little confusing to use, which is why I stick to NZB files with it.

“Giganews is the Premium product- pricing and product reflect this.
We have made a choice to differentiate Giganews and will continue to do this- we are not done with where Giganews is going .”

So in other words, it’s a marketing decision. Why didn’t you just say so? Also, have you ever considered the impact this has on potential sales of personal accounts? For a long time, I thought that Giganews’s 250+ day retention was either really crappy, or a flat-out lie because I couldn’t download anything that old. If people have Giganews as part of their ISP and don’t see the 300 day retention that Giganews advertises, then when they go looking for a personal account they’re going to think that their money would be better spent elsewhere.

“is there something I am missing in the service that does searches like newzbin to find the newsgroup that contains the ‘files’ im looking for? it would be easier to search in one app than bouncing back and forth.. newzbin isnt always accurate for newgroup locations for files.. i search, i find, i surf to the group, its not there…”

I just go to binsearch.info or newzleech.com, search for what I want, then generate an NZB file. Unless the file is too old, as detailed in my previous post, it downloads just fine.

“u know, releasers tend to bounce around using different groups to post in order to stymie asshats like the MAFIAA.”

I’ve never used Newzbin, but I know that when searching on free indexing sites, you often have to search for the release name rather than the official title. At least for movies. TV shows are posted normally.

“and I dunno about everyone else, but I never found a file I wanted and THEN waited 300 days to download it.”

Neither have I. Where the retention issue comes in is when you search for something you just learned that you wanted and Binsearch says it was posted 250-300 days ago. In fact, a friend recently asked me if I could find an episode of the Tonight Show that aired toward the end of last year. I found it, but it was 244 days old and I had to download it from Astraweb because my Giganews retention doesn’t go back that far. That happens fairly often, I’ll see something, think “I should see if that’s been posted recently”, do a search and find that it was posted months ago.

Of course, you can always request a re-post, but such requests don’t always get filled, just like on the P2P networks. I’ve been trying to get 6 episodes of a cancelled SciFi show re-shared on eD2K for like a month now…