An Independent Usenet Provider
Good Stuff News is an offshoot of the Good Stuff website combined with a news server which was originally set up in order to host the moderation software for the uk.religion.christian newsgroup.
Initially, the only user of the news server was the moderation software, since Usenet can be quite space-demanding and there wasn't enough spare capacity to carry more groups than were necessary. However, that was several years ago, and the server hosting the software has been through several upgrade iterations since then. Over the same period of time, Usenet access has become less and less a core aspect of an ISP's service and many ISPs do not, in fact, even operate a Usenet server any more.
It seemed a fairly obvious move, therefore, to take both of these changes into account and set up Good Stuff News as a public news server. In order to maintain the primacy of its intended purpose (hosting the moderation software), this has to be paid-for access rather than a free server. But, since it's only necessary to cover costs and ensure that when an upgrade is necessary, the income from paying customers can support any new hardware requirements, the prices can be lower than charged by most commercial Usenet services. Good Stuff News is, therefore, priced at the budget end of the market as a cheap, cheerful and simple service rather than trying to compete with the big name providers.
Pricing
Good Stuff News has a simple, flat-rate pricing of £1.00 per month, payable in advance in blocks of 6 or 12 months.
Service
Good Stuff News has a full feed of uk.*, plus any text-only "Big 8" or alt.* groups that are requested by users. The server does not carry any binary groups or groups where the primary language is not English.
Good Stuff News is not an anonymising server - your IP address will appear as the NNTP-Posting-Host in all your posts. Also, we take abuse complaints seriously and will act on them where necessary. You will not be permitted to use the Good Stuff News server as a means by which to abuse Usenet or the Internet as a whole. Please see the Usage Policies for more detail on what is permitted.
As this is a cheap and still experimental service, there are no SLAs. If you are unhappy with the service, you can cancel at any time and receive a pro-rata refund for unused whole months.
How to Subscribe
Start by registering your username and password. This will give you access to the server for testing purposes - you will be able to see the goodstuff.* internal hierarchy without payment. Once you're happy that you can make a successful connection to the server, then you can make an online payment to buy access to the public groups.
Support
Where possible, please use the local newsgroup goodstuff.support for support requests, including all requests for the addition of new groups or hierarchies and any reports of poor performance. If you are unable to log in at all, then please email 'help{at}news.good-stuff.co.uk' (after making the obvious substitutions to render the address valid). Email support will only be available to registered users who are unable to log in.
Alternatives
If you want a service with real SLAs, binaries and long-term retention and are willing to pay accordingly, then we recommend Easynews.
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