USENET

[#1]

I suppose I should report, seeing PN havent, that Giganews have bought Supernews, who have been supplying PN's USENET feed, and that on March 31 Giganews newsgroups will replace the existing Supernews newsgroups. In practical terms this means that all newsgroups will be renumbered and usually will have to be deleted and a fresh set of articles downloaded. This is true for OE but not necaserily (sp!) for other agents  but I am sure Bob Pullen will supply the details. As personally I have around 60 newsgroups on OE it is going to be a bit of a nightmare for me especially as there are rumours that Giganews has 4.7 years retention. This is not PNs fault as I dont suppose they could have foreseen that Supernews would be bought out when they signed the contract. Aaaaargh is all that can be said. I would wait on March 31 until there is confirmation that the switch to Giganews has taken place before doing anything.

[#2]

I'll be posting a Service Status about this later today and will publish a linking article on the Community front page.
Following article numbers are from the same post.
Giganews:

Xref: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com uk.telecom.broadband:263606

Supernews:

Xref: sn-us uk.telecom.broadband:240710

So on the 31st I reckon most clients will stop collecting posts for the moderated groups like p.s.customer-feedback, whilst duplicate posts will be downloaded for the non-moderated groups.
As to what steps you'll need to take to remedy this, I think we can say from experience that this will depend on the client.
Safest bet is to delete and recreate your news account and then resubscribe to all your groups. Far from ideal, but there's not a lot we can to to minimise the impact of this.