Planned News Server Upgrades
"...we are now in the process of implementing a new program called SurgeNews across our corporate server fleet. We have already begun implementing this new program on the servers that our direct subscribers use and so far it seems to be working very well."
"SurgeNews is a Usenet proxy system that lets us run several spool servers hidden behind a cluster of front end proxy servers. Once fully implemented it will appears as if your customers only have access to a single server but they will actually have the access to all of the data available on the four backend servers that you are currently connecting to. The only difference will be when your customers download headers from a group the headers from all four backend servers will appear in their news reader as if it were a single super server. This new architecture will enable us to scale out our service in a way that has not been possible in the past due to hardware limitations."
Full implementation of the SurgeNews system is still a few months away and we still have some bugs to work out. In the mean time please bear with us. We do realize that completion and retention are not as good as they once were. The old system was simply no longer able to deal with enormous growth that Usenet has experienced over the last few years. This is why we are now implementing this new new architecture...."