Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

Principal Engineer Jeff Pabian drops in again today with an update to Usenet Revisited:

Hey Folks,

Jeff Pabian, Principal Engineer at EarthLink here. Dave asked me to post a follow-up to Usenet Revisited since we made the cutover to our outsourced Usenet service provider recently.

The cat is out of the bag; EarthLink is outsourcing our Usenet service to Supernews. As I said previously, we were all pretty excited we would be able to improve our service. There are some changes and growing pains if you will, but over all I believe the Usenet service we offer now to be much improved.

Today, I'll talk about what I believe the improvements are and some of the issues we've come up against, and what might be in store for phase II. First, just to clarify, I am not the Product Manager for the service; I'm just a long-time employee who has seen the ups and downs of the service over the years. My colleagues and I conduct analysis and make recommendations to the Product group, (who also read the blog and comments and post every one in a while).

If you've been over to the earthlink.* newsgroups, you've most likely seen the lively discussion we've been having around the changeover to the outsourced provider. Right off the bat, I consider these items to be the biggest areas of improvement:

• Complete posts
  
• Way longer retention
  
• Additional newsgroups that ELNK hasn't added for years (binary AND text)
  
• Off network access (provided you have a valid Earthlink username and password)
  
• Excellent anti-spam measures
  
• No download cap / limit
  

In contrast, our old news service had the following, uh... features:

• Incomplete posts
  
• 2-3 day retention for binary groups
  
• We haven't added groups for about two years
  
• Limited to ELNK networks, only
  
• 5GB limit with a rolling 30 day window, then your connection was throttled down to 64Kbps

As far as what we're hearing from you all:

• Some users have had problems with their clients and seeing the changes to the new groups. The fixes range from simply "resetting" the news server settings in your client to completely removing and re-creating your newserver account.
  
• Some customers feel the download rate we're currently using to be inadequate. I anticipate we'll be able to conduct some analysis and adjust the rate accordingly, (but don't quote me on that). I can say that I've shared the concerns and feedback I've gotten with the product managers and the support groups.

We are getting ready to begin "Phase II" of the project. If you have any ideas or input towards "Phase II" please feel free to send them to me or post a comment, or... post it to one of the EarthLink newsgroups*!

Thank you for your feedback and keep it coming.

*Here's a listing of them:

• earthlink.watercooler
  
• earthlink.test
  
• earthlink.support.wireless
  
• earthlink.support.windows
  
• earthlink.support.web
  
• earthlink.support.usenet.newstest2
  
• earthlink.support.usenet
  
• earthlink.support.unix
  
• earthlink.support.startpage
  
• earthlink.support.other
  
• earthlink.support.macos
  
• earthlink.support.integrations
  
• earthlink.support.highspeed.satellite
  
• earthlink.support.highspeed.dsl
  
• earthlink.support.highspeed.cable
  
• earthlink.support.email
  
• earthlink.support.dialup
  
• earthlink.general-discussion
  
• earthlink.coffeehouse