Some news servers provide free access to the public. There are more than 50K
newsgroups on the Usenet (as of 2001), and most Internet service
providers provide access only to a subset. Most of the common newsgroups are
available from most Internet Service
Providers, but you may sometimes wish to explore other groups offered by other
news servers.
A number of news administrators make their news servers available
to the public. They may provide this capability to make newsgroups available
to
people who don't have other means of access, just for testing, or for their
own independent reasons.
The following web sites maintain lists
of free public news servers:
Historical free public news servers:
You can access a news
server by first adding it to your news reader's
list of servers. Public news servers listed on the sites above may not always
be accessible
when you try them, perhaps because they were only accessible
for testing. You may have to try several sites before you find one open
at
the time you are trying to access it.
If your regular Internet service provider
doesn't provide you with all of the groups you want, and public news servers
are not an option, you may want to consider third-party commercial
news servers. These provide you with access to the Usenet for a fee, and often
provide other value added services. A list of commercial news servers can
be found in
the Yahoo category Usenet
Servers > Commercial.
