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Totally Objects has been providing a free
access news server for Smalltalk and Object related newsgroups for
some years now For those of you that use our server, the following
is mostly for information only.
Giganews -
http://www.giganews.com/ - has made a very generous offer to
host news.totallyobjects.com for free. This means that Totally
Objects is both freed from the costs of maintaining the free
access newsserver that it has been running for the last 5 - 6
years and also free of the maintenance element of the provision.
They will continue to provide a free access service with no
requirement to sign up, login, or any other registration process.
Neither will there be any branding or other imposition by them and
hence you should notice no difference in acess or service levels.
For more information check out
Usenet
Newsgroups
The transfer to Giga news will take place
sometime early next week. This posting is for information only
with regard to the general newsgroups hosted by us as the
changeover will be seamless. We will just be changing the CNAME
record for the site. This means that you will still be able to
access the free newsserver as news.totallyobjects.com and hence
you need do nothing except maybe refresh your newsgroup list.
There is a small downside in that we have
been able to retain all postings for substantial part of our
operation whilst Giganews currently has only (grin) 940 days of
messages. However, Giganews assures us that they have no plans to
expire any messages on their text based newsgroups so from now on
the history should be safe.
The main change is with the local newsgroups
that we created for specialist interests. Giganews is not able to
manage the purely local groups that Totally Objects has been
providing in the same way that we have done it. It turns out that
we have broken protocol a little by naming our internal newsgroups
as comp.lang.xxx. Giganews has had to rename these to be
totallyobjects.smalltalk.xxx and has not been able to import the
existing messages. This affects three groups on our server
c.l.objectstudio, c.l.mt and c.l.ambrai.. These three newsgroups
will be renamed as above and start off with an empty message list.
Once the changeover has taken place, we shall arrange for the
existing messages to be archived as a single text item and
re-posted to the newsgroups. Not brilliant but the best that we
can do. From the changeover, you can post to the news groups as
before.
Totally Objects would like to thank Giganews
for their generous offer. A full press release about the move will
be available soon on our web site
http://www.totallyobjects.com.
For your information, Giganews current
statistics on some of the newsgroups hosted by us are as follows:
Newsgroup - Articles - Retention
comp.lang.smalltalk 13178 940+ days comp.lang.smalltalk.advocacy
931 939+ days comp.lang.smalltalk.dolphin 8358 940+ days
comp.databases.object 2237 940+ days comp.object 38951 940+ days
comp.software.extreme-programming 10469 940+ days
comp.software.patterns 696 937+ days
Should you wish to propose any further
newsgroups or should you find any probems with the service from
Giganews, please contact me -
david@totallyobjects.com - in all circumstances. Please note
that all newsgroups hosted must be either Smalltalk or Object
related. Totally Objects decision on the provision of a newsgroup
is final.
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