Newscene Review (Provider Offline)

Last Updated: Sep 12, 2025

Rating
Price	$12.99 / Month
Retention	900 Days
Free Trial	None
Features	US and EU Servers
	Newsgroup Search Option
	High Degree of Anonymity

Update (September 2025): As of late 2025, Newscene appears to be offline and is no longer available as a Usenet provider. The website is inaccessible and sign-ups are not possible. The following review is retained for historical reference.

Newscene was a Usenet news service that was said to offer a high degree of anonymity for subscribers. However, upon checking their website, not only did it lack a lot of information to make a sound decision about this Usenet provider, but it also seemed outdated and was offline for sign-ups.

Newscene Quick Summary (Historical)

• Access to over 53,000 newsgroups
• “High degree” of anonymity
• Newsgroup search option on website
• US and EU servers
• Month to month and Multi-month plans
• Metered without speed limit
• 9 connections
• Outdated service and website
• Sign-up system offline in later years
• Support via FAQs and tech team

Binary Retention

As mentioned, there was a lack of information with this Usenet service. Both their text and binary retention were not mentioned on their site.

Pricing

Newscene offered monthly, 3 month, and 6 month plans. When compared to top Usenet service providers, their prices were higher.

This Usenet service had a “metered download without speed limit’’ plan which gave you a download allowance and a specific amount of time within which you could use that download limit.

Free Trial Info

Newscene did not have any free trial offering.

Special Offers/ Coupons

This Usenet service provider did not have any special offers.

Speed Test

Since account sign up was unavailable, we were not able to test this provider for speed. According to their plans, they did offer unlimited speed and were expected to perform well in terms of how fast their service could be, since most Usenet providers have no issues with speed. Please note, though, that the speed of your Usenet activity also relied on how fast your own internet connection was.

Connections

You could use up to 9 connections simultaneously with this Usenet provider.

News Servers/ Ports/ Configuration

To configure Newscene with your desired newsreader, you would log in with your account details and in your newsreader settings or systems tab fill in the news server information: news.newscene.com along with the number of connections you could use and the port numbers. Port information was not available on the Newscene website.

Frequently Asked Questions

The FAQs below were found on the Newscene website.

Q: How do I set up and configure my news reader program to access Newscene?
A: You can find the setup instructions for many news readers on their News Reader Configurations section.

Q. News header and/or article retrieval is slow.
A: The Internet is a complex network structure. Several things can go wrong. The most common conclusion is the news server is overloaded, bandwidth is maximized, or too many users. With the recent upgrades in Sparc hardware and T3 installations these issues are not the problem here at Newscene. Alternative problems are related to your ISP, backbone provider problems, congested network exchanges, packet flooding by a faulty router, and the list goes on. To determine possible routing issues you can perform a traceroute from our servers to you.

Q: I cannot retrieve any new messages in the groups.
A: Your resource information used by your news reader program still contains information from your old news server. To fix this you will need to force your news reader to rebuild the resource information file. Each news reader is a little different. Most likely you can unsubscribe to all of your groups (be sure to not save any current resource information if prompted). Then resubscribe and get all the available headers from our news server.

Make sure you are accessing an active group. There are alot of junk newsgroups. Some with closely matched names. Be sure the group name is actually the one you really want and not a misspelled group.

Q: How do I change my password?
A: Please use the Account Maintenance area on their website

Q: How is my account billed?
A: Newscene’s billing cycle is based upon your signup “anniversary date.” For example, if you signed up for a month-to-month account on the 10th of the month, your credit card will be billed on the 10th of every month. Each monthly account is renewed automatically until you cancel your account. Unless we are instructed to do otherwise, prepay (multi-month) accounts are not automatically renewed. When the subscription nears its expiration, a notice of the expiration is sent to the email address we have on file for the account. Renewal information is included with the notice.

Q: I am getting a “502 Authentication Error.” What does this mean?
A: This means that your login or password is incorrect, or your subscription has expired, or you have exceeded your download allowance.

Q: Why are some multi-part binary postings incomplete while another news server has all of the parts?
A: News propagation is never guaranteed. News propagation is dependent upon network conditions, the number and quality of news peers, server conditions, forged cancellations, and the size of the post. Any post made to a server is sent out to all of its peering servers. All premium news services have multiple source feeds to get more news in and out faster. Some posts are sectioned into smaller segments to help improve propagation to other servers. Because of this segmentation, some posts may appear incomplete and the upload was interrupted. This is why not all multipart binaries are complete. Some parts of multipart posts can be canceled. Newscene does not honor any cancellations because it is too easy to forge cancellations. However some servers do honor cancellations. This fact alone could prevent some parts of the post from not reaching a server.

Q: I am not able to locate a newsgroup.
A: If you are not able to locate a newsgroup on Newscene that you have located on another server or know of its existence then send us an email requesting us to add the group.

Support

Newscene had an FAQ page on their website as well as configuration information for several newsreaders. If you wished to contact their support team, you could email them at sales@newscene.com or tech@newscene.com.

Contact Information

You could contact Newscene by email, fax, or mail.

Newscene Usenet News Service
PO Box 45349
Omaha, NE 68145-0349
fax: 1 (402) 895-2637
sales@newscene.com or tech@newscene.com

Security/ Company Privacy Policy

According to their privacy policy: Information about account holders at Newscene was strictly confidential and would not be released to anyone without proper legal authorization.

Payment Options

It was unclear what payment options were allowed with Newscene since their sign-up system was offline.

Our Opinion

We recommended looking at other Usenet service providers since Newscene was very outdated and did not offer a lot of information about their service. There wasn’t even any information about SSL encryption, which is a crucial factor when choosing a Usenet provider. With their high pricing, outdated website, lack of details, and unimpressive features, there were not a lot of reasons why users would go for this Usenet service.

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