NextGenNews Feedback Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
S

savage

Expert Member
Joined
Aug 11, 2003
Messages
2,922
Reaction score
12
Location
Bothasig, Western Cape
NextGenNews, South Africa's first commercial NNTP Service Provider, has today officially launched it's services. Back in the day when we where developing the server side of the software, we've had very good feedback and success from our trial thread

We would like to thank all our beta testers and trial users, and we are confident that we will be able to provide our users with an high quality service. We are completely driven by reliability, high availability, and staying customer focused. Our users, determines most of our roadmap in terms of future development!

Our customer referral program is also live, and accessible from our customer portal. Please feel free to send invites to your friends to use our fantastic service! For any user that you refer to us, you will receive 7 days’ worth of access free of charge. In order for you to receive your free access period, the user that you have referred must have an active subscription – that means, the user should have made an payment in order to have an active subscription.

Lastly, for our launching celebrations, we have decided to give away some prizes too! This is a once-off launching special and we trust that it will have the impact that we are hoping for. The details are simple, but brief:
- The first 200 registered accounts (trial users or not) making an successful payment, will receive an additional 30 days of access free of charge (Users can purchase subscriptions even when their trial period is still active).
- On the 1st of May, we will draw three user accounts randomly from our user base that has an active paid for subscription. We will award the following prizes:
- 1 x 1st Prize: Proline Smart AK888-15 Dual Core Android 9.7” Tablet
- 1 x 2nd Prize: TakeAllot.com, R1000 gift voucher
- 3 x 3rd Prize: TakeAllot.com, R500 gift voucher

Please remember that you can switch between the Volume and Time based accounts at any time. Volume based accounts will never expire, and the GB bundles purchased on your account will remain active indefinitely, until you’ve downloaded all of it. Time based accounts will however expire – we cannot stop the clock.
 
Last edited:
hereticangel said:
Is this hosted in south africa? no dmca takedowns?
Click to expand...
Last I heard its overseas with plans to move it if viable.

Pretty sure the DMCAs will go after the upstream providers anyway, so hosting location is of little consequence.
 
HavocXphere said:
Last I heard its overseas with plans to move it if viable.

Pretty sure the DMCAs will go after the upstream providers anyway, so hosting location is of little consequence.
Click to expand...

Might give them try anyway next month :P after my tweaknews run out
 
Hi,

DCMA will be there, not from us fortunately, but mostly from the Tier 1 providers that we peer with to obtain articles. The impact is significantly less however, as the providers we use only provide bulk feeds, and do not resell to the public. As the public does not have access to those servers, the only DCMA's they get, is what their customers (NNTP Service Providers) reports to them.

One of our unique features however is that we peer with more than one Tier 1 provider internationally, and we've noticed that very frequently we will pick up an article at an alternative provider when our primary has DCMA'ed it. We like to think that if we can't obtain the article, it pretty much doesn't exist anywhere..

The Services is still currently hosted in Germany yes. We are however an registered South African business, charging in local currencies. You save on exchange fluxuations, bulk users saves of fixed pricing instead of variable rates, users without credit cards can also make use of the services now, and we WILL move everything into Teraco CPT as soon as the userbase is large enough to cover the costs.

We're really not bad at all in terms of service, and how more people use us, how faster we will be local :D
 
Last edited:
Just in case someone else is stumped - the "username" you need for login is your email address.
 
No I meant site login. Username isn't mentioned anywhere...until you are asked to provide it.
 
Hi All,

Just a quick update in terms of DMCA seeing that we are half day through the first day of operation...

Our primary uplink provider has so far, failed to provide us with 14,322 articles (DMCA'ed)
NextGenNews has received requests for 43,706 articles (approximately)
NextGenNews has failed to provide it's customers with 176 articles (accurate count), or 0.4%

That 0.4% of articles (haven't been confirmed) are more than likely new news, that hasn't populated through the channels yet. The rest, seems to have all been picked up through our complex system of backup providers and multiple peering. Either way, we are not joking when we say we will be providing an RELIABLE news service.

We will process these stats on a daily basis and provide statistics about our completion rates via the customer zone after some more development took place.

Looking forward to hear any and all feedback (good or bad) about the servers. We are here to make reliable news an reality.
 
^^^^^^^

Seems like the real deal. Trying it out as we speak. Mailed support and got my matter resolved and a reply within a minute. I IESH you not.
 
++

I recommend NextGenNews, really professional and competitive pricing to.
 
trial

hi,

ive just signed up now myself, been using newshosting.. having issue's with so much being dmca'd, hope you guys will be better and i can catch up on some old files...

thanks & lets see how it goes :)
 
mercurial said:
Looking forward to reviews. R99 per month is a good price. How many days retention does it have?
Click to expand...

Hi,

It's difficult to say we run with x Days of Retention. We don't work with retention. We use an intelligent algorithm for content expiration. An article which was accessed the longest time ago, will be deleted first only if, and when, the server requires disk space. We don't look at the content of articles at all - not even the headers (thus we also have significantly less processing and IO requirements on our servers).

It's similar to the algorithms used by HTTP Proxy Servers for content expiration. We effectively took LFUDA (Least Frequently Used with Dynamic Aging) from Squid and implemented it on NNTP.

I can say this however - the amount of articles that we are unable to serve to our customers, are *very* little...
 
Last edited:
would one be able to get files that were uploaded say 700 days ago?

oh and do you have a 'fair usage policy'?
 
Last edited:
savage said:
Hi,

It's difficult to say we run with x Days of Retention. We don't work with retention. We use an intelligent algorithm for content expiration. An article which was accessed the longest time ago, will be deleted first only if, and when, the server requires disk space. We don't look at the content of articles at all - not even the headers (thus we also have significantly less processing and IO requirements on our servers).

It's similar to the algorithms used by HTTP Proxy Servers for content expiration. We effectively took LFUDA (Least Frequently Used with Dynamic Aging) from Squid and implemented it on NNTP.

I can say this however - the amount of articles that we are unable to serve to our customers, are *very* little...
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply. Sounds good.
 
Morph69 said:
would one be able to get files that were uploaded say 700 days ago?

oh and do you have a 'fair usage policy'?
Click to expand...

Hi Morph69,

If the articles are still available at our Tier 1's that we peer with (and it should be), then yes you will be able to get them. Unfortunately, the best way to see is to just try and download it and see whether it's successfull or not. Unfortunately there's no way to determine what is, and isn't available. We should easily be able to retrieve articles as old as 1,600+ days, depending on what has been DMCA'd and what hasn't.

No fair usage policy, I think that most ISPs already took care of most of that stuff. We're not here to add MORE red tape to our users. We will however be introducing an registration policy in terms of the 7-day trial, and duplicate accounts. We've already had quite a few registrations that was registered in ways to 'bypass' our validation and in doing so to get multiple accounts, and/or multiple trial periods. Accounts found registered in this manner, will be deleted on the spot, no questions asked (especially in terms of fake or email forwarding email addresses). If you as a user play fair, we as a company will play fair as well (there is at the end of the day, operating costs which we need to paid).

Hopefully this clears it up a bit better :)
 
Hmm. Any chance of a trial account? I am a news demon customer, will switch if you have less dmca **** than them...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X