I've been using Usenet and Newzbin/NZBmatrix for 4 or 5 years. New content has been getting taken down the past few months. Go look at the comment section of any new movie. It got progressively worse, to the point that I was starting to consider what to do next. I suppose I'm not surprised to see this this morning. But it was abrupt.

I was getting a good amount of missing blocks on Astraweb only; I bought a backup news account from blocknews and haven't had any missing block issues since.

It helps if people put big pars out.

An example of someone writing a better implementation of a program and taking over a protocol. DirectConnect was a centralized client-server file sharing program[1], with a client and server (both written in VB). DC++ was a C++ implementation that started out as 3rd party implementation of the client, and then IIRC the server. The original client/server were incredibly buggy, so DC++ client/server over-took the original client (they may have even extended the protocol).

[1]: Basically, you connect to a central server (that anyone can run), and you can share files with other connected to the server, chat with them (a single central chat room), private message connected users, and search files shared by connected users. Note: that some of this may be out of date as I'm mostly referring to the initial implementation.

A centralized, IRC-like network for file exchange. Or rather, DC++ is the client to that network.