Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!utoday!greenber
From: greenber@utoday.UUCP (Ross M. Greenberg)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Adding commercial access to Usenet
Summary: Bix is more than worth the money
Keywords: news BIX
Message-ID: <491@utoday.UUCP>
Date: 14 Feb 89 06:25:42 GMT
References: <796@n8emr.UUCP> <4524@inco.UUCP> <206@bixpb> <3079@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: greenber@.UUCP (Ross M. Greenberg)
Organization: "UNIX TODAY!"
Lines: 44

It seems obvious to me that you've not taken a trip over to BIX, Karl.

Matt Trask would love to have you join his boating conference, for example.
I don't recall who the scuba conference moderator is, but there is a
conference for this, too.  In fact, there are probably more conferences
on BIX than there are newsgroups on USENET.

I used to be the moderator for a consultants conference, a conference on
the IBM PS/2 series of computers and another for software authors.

BIX is a *big* place.  And pretty friendly.  Well, mostly friendly: there
are some folks there who tend to be a little rude, but he's only one
BYTE columnist, anyway.  :-)

And, for the most part, has a full history of the last 'n' years of operation
(Ben, how many years has it been?).  This means that you can scan a
considerable knowledge base rather rapidly and rather inexpensively. Somebody
else provides the [virtual] unlimited disk space, flames are pulled out of
the message stream, foul language and advertisments are pulled.

Not to imply there is censorship, though:  just a coupla ground rules which
make BIX a pretty pleasant place to visit.  At about $6/hr, it can get a
tad expensive if you stay on-line all day.  Of course, many people simply
download all outstanding messages and keep upto date off-line.  It takes
about ten minutes per day for most people to work this way.  Not so much
for what you get, in my opinion. I used to belong to 84 conferences, each
averaging eight topics.  My daily download took 15 minutes.

My affiliation with BIX, currently, is that of a happy user.  I moderate
a closed conference, so maybe I'm still a little biased: moderators do
not pay for their on-line time.

Simply because BIX charges a coupla bucks doesn't mean that they're somehow
money-sucking-scum-buckets.  You get a pretty good value for your dollar.

I suggest that you take them up on their freebie trial offer before you put
them down.....you might be surprised to find that they complement USENET
pretty darn well.  Heck, each of the pay services serves a particular class
of user/customer - just as USENET does.

Ross M. Greenberg
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