[leafnode-list] (OT) recommendations for news service?

[Adam Funk <adam00f@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This isn't a technical question about leafnode, but a request for
recommendations from other leafnode users.  I apologize if that
bothers anyone.

I really like the combination of slrn and leafnode, but I'm having a
terrible time getting a good feed assembled from news.individual.net
(which is supposed to be good, or at least good value for money) and
my ISP's server, text.news.blueyonder.co.uk.  I'm trying to download
about 40 text groups (no binaries at all) and some of the groups I've
recently subscribed to have no traffic at all on my leafnode machine
although I can tell (from Google groups) that they are active.

grep news /var/log/syslog shows groups of entries like this:

Jan 30 11:08:01 garcia /USR/SBIN/CRON[22833]: (news) CMD (if [ -x /etc/news/leafnode/do-fetch-news ]; then /etc/news/leafnode/do-fetch-news; fi)
Jan 30 11:08:01 garcia fetchnews[22835]: leafnode 1.11.4: verbosity level is 0, debugmode is 0
Jan 30 11:10:31 garcia fetchnews[22835]: < (ERROR: timeout - no response in 60 s)
Jan 30 11:10:31 garcia fetchnews[22835]: Server disconnection or timeout before article could be retrieved #2
Jan 30 11:10:31 garcia fetchnews[22835]: Warning: aborting fetch from news.individual.net due to previous condition.
Jan 30 11:11:12 garcia fetchnews[22835]: < (ERROR: timeout - no response in 60 s)
Jan 30 11:11:12 garcia fetchnews[22835]: Server disconnection or timeout before article could be retrieved #1
Jan 30 11:11:12 garcia fetchnews[22835]: Warning: aborting fetch from text.news.blueyonder.co.uk due to previous condition.

I've tried running it with debugging on, and various other things, and
I think leafnode is working fine but the servers just time out.  I've
increased the cron job frequency to 4 per hour and I'm still not
getting a good newsfeed.

So I think I should try subscribing to another news service
(e.g. astraweb.com or supernews.com) and I wonder if any other
leafnode users have any recommendations?

-- 
Thanks,
Adam

-- 
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