In a recent news article we announced that we would shortly be outsourcing the provisioning of our Usenet service to a third party.
The preliminary work to do this is now complete and customers can now access the new platform using the details below:
Server: plusnet.vsrv-ams.supernews.net
Port: 119 or 443
Username (optional): existing
Password (optional): existing
We are making this information available to allow customers the opportunity to help test the new platform before we make the DNS changes to switch across to the new service.
It's worth mentioning that customers configuring their news clients to use the new server details will not retain their posting history and will need to resubscribe to the groups that they are monitoring. The old platform will remain operational until the decision is made to configure DNS to point to the new platform.
Posts to our private groups (eg. plusnet.service.customer-feedback) are not currently propagating to the new servers and no posts since the 16th July will be visible when using the test servers to browse these groups. This is something that we are aware of and something that will be fixed before the service is fully launched.
At the time of writing you will need to be connected to the PlusNet network in order to access the server.
All feedback welcomed in the forum thread here.
Happy testing!
Bob
New Usenet platform now open for testing