ACCESSING ABIA-F

What do I need in order to access ABIA-F?
You need:

1. An Internet account.
2. Access to a news server that carries this newsgroup.
3. Software for reading Usenet news (see section IX).
Most Internet service providers (ISP's) have Usenet news as part of the package they offer. In many cases, however, they do not carry ABIA-F and many similar newsgroups. If that is the case with your ISP, you should consider setting up an account with a commercial news service provider. These are either full ISP's who offer Usenet news service separately, or specialized providers who only offer news, or news and mail. If you need to go with a commercial news service provider, try these links:
www.altopia.com (USA)
www.supernews.com(USA)
www.triton.net/news.htm(USA)
www.vip-news.com (Germany)
Expect to pay between 10 and 25 dollars per month for this kind of service.
What do I need to consider when selecting a news server? :
The major factors that determine if a news server is good or bad are the following:
1. The size of its storage space. A good news server should have enough storage space to hold all articles in all the newsgroups that it carries for at least two or three days.

2. The quality of its news feed. The newsfeed is all-important. By newsfeed we mean the exchange of news articles between different news servers. Newsfeed is negotiated between service providers; a good server should exchange news articles with as many and as big news servers as possible.

3. The quality of its connections to the Internet backbone. The quality of the backbone connections determines the performance you will get from the server. Some service providers do not have enough bandwidth in relation to the number of customers; this will make the server seem slow to you. It is also an advantage if the service provider has links to more than one of the major players (MCI, Sprintlink etc.). Sometimes an entire backbone network will be plagued by congestion; it may then be possible for the news provider to give you an alternate route to the server.
What is the average newsfeed per day (= number of new messages)?
At the present time, it's about 1000, although this figure varies. On weekends, the feed is usually above 1500 and sometimes even exceeds the 2000 mark. During times of thumper bombing campaigns or severe flame wars, the article count may increase dramatically. Counts of several thousand per day have been known to occur.
Hey, I get far less than that!
If you consistently see much lower numbers of new articles, your news server doesn't have a good feed. You should consider switching to another service provider. NOTE: If you use a kill filter in your newsreader, check the settings you are using. Maybe you just added too many "skip-kills".
Where can I get more help on using Usenet news?
Help with the use of Usenet in general is provided at:
www.newbies-netguide.com/usenet/ulist.html
www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/8211
www.yahoo.com/text/News_and_Media/Usenet/