NewsDemon Site/Service Update

I would like to thank all our loyal customers for helping make NewsDemon one of the best Usenet communities on the planet! I have decided to give a status report on where our service stands currently:

The Good:
 

  • 1)  Our actual server farms are running very smoothly. We have not had a service interruption of any kind in over five years, and that outage was because of a fiber cut.
  • 2)  We continue to increase our retention daily.
  • 3)  We are currently developing a new website interface for both our web portal and the members area of our site designed to modernize the site and user experience.  ETA sometime before year end.
  • 4)  We will soon be adding some new payment options!
  • 5)  We continue to provide a FREE VPN account with every recurring account.
  • 6)  Users will have a better interface to upgrade/downgrade their accounts, add blocks, add multiple blocks at once, a better vacation pause feature, easier addition of backup payment options, etc.  If anyone has some requests for feature adds, please comment on this blog post!
  • 7)  We continue to be the only provider to give special discounts to military and students.
  • 8)  We continue to be the only provider to offer free accounts to journalists/media and to educators.
  • 9) We are adding a Price Match policy.

Known Issues:
 

  • 1)  Some of our users are not receiving emails from NewsDemon if they are using Microsoft/Live/Outlook/MSN/Hotmail accounts.  We are working on the issue.  No firm ETA.  In the meantime, please use an alternative email address for signing up and support tickets.  If you do not have one, please send support tickets to newsdemon (at) gmail.com as a LAST RESORT.
  • 2)  We have been made aware of some customers being billed multiple times in a month.  This is a legacy code issue with our older website code and we are going to eliminate this issue with the new site design/architecture.  Please be assured that anyone who is billed in error can receive a full refund.
  • 3)  We have also been made aware that some users have NOT been billed in months and they should have.  Again, this will be solved in the new site architecture.  We will not be going back to “catch up” on your billing.  We thank those of you who have been forthcoming!
  • 4)  The signup/join process is not showing updated pricing once a coupon has been accepted.  This should be resolved soon.
  • 5)  Some users have complained about their transaction not being accepted.  This is a fraud monitoring issue and we will have to work continuously to adjust and tweak our fraud prevention system to help eliminate some of this.  Unfortunately, I can not see this ever totally going away based on the nature of how fraud monitoring for credit cards works.

I would like to finish up by saying that I really appreciate all the support you have given us over the years.  I started the company to provide a quality Usenet service at an affordable price and I think we have done that for sixteen years!  I stepped away from management of the company for a few years and the Usenet industry changed and my team did not adjust and change with it. Unfortunately things did not run as smoothly as our customers expect and deserve.  I apologize and promise that will never happen again.  Satisfying our customers is the #1 goal.
 
Thank you for sticking with us!
 

G. Lyda
President
 
 
 

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