[Solved thanks to @tal. See instructions below.]
I’d like to subscribe and occasionally post to some usenet newsgroup like sci.physics or sci.physics.research. It’s difficult! I tried to simply enter “sci.physics” in Thunderbird’s Newsgroup reader, but apparently it doesn’t work simply like that… Even subscribing to news.eternal-september.org didn’t help – I think my understanding of providers and groups is very confused.
Could anyone kindly help?
Eternal September is limited on retention for the groups they carry. Should you find that you want to go back for historical discussion or nostalgia you can pay a bit for a commercial server to get posts going back many years. block accounts (set amount of data) will be fine as it will take forever to use up gigabytes with only text posts. 5 gigs or less is fine and usually only cost a few bucks. Blocknews.net has 5 for $2.
Thank you for the heads-up, it is quite cheap indeed. I noticed that some of the newsgroups unfortunately have much spam, so I’ll see if I’m really interested in subscribing. But some are moderated, luckily.
yes lots of spam but hopefully if more people use them discussion will come back and spam will stop.