newsletter://mv.com July 2001 OpenSRS domain registrations In our May newsletter we told you that we had signed on as an affili- ate of OpenSRS, a competitive domain registrar operated (under ICANN guide- lines) by the same people that run the TUCOWS software archives (note that we also operate a TUCOWS mirror at http://tucows.mv.net/). Since mention- ing it, we've had a lot of people express great interest in this, and we realize that getting this up and operating as a service is of high value. As of this writing we are still not automated enough to make it generally available, although we have done a number of manual transfers with success. However we can tell you our thoughts on how we will transition our policies to use this new relationship. We'll provide domain registry and renewal service for .COM, .NET, and .ORG domains for $12 per year. We'll also have other top level domains available via our OpenSRS relationship, but we haven't established pricing for those as yet. The quantum for registrations will be a year: you may move or delete your domain before the year is up, but the yearly fee will stand. Please note that we only intend this service for our customers, with domains using our nameservers (or our customers nameservers, if you operate one) -- we don't intend to perform registry services at this price for people who have no other relationship with us. We'll also be changing our rate structure for operating domains on our nameservers. Up until now we have had a rate structure where we charge a $20/month minimum for a domain nameservice -- if you already spend $20/month with us on something else such as a dialup account, the minimum is covered by that payment. We've found that this tends to be confusing, and it also doesn't really address the operation of our nameservers as well as the high quality secondary nameservice in various geographical areas. For all new domains hosted at MV starting September 1, the first domain per client won't incur additional charges when combined with other service. If you have more than one domain, we will simply charge $1/month for the name- service for your additional domains. For those of you who have domains with us already, we will switch to the new rate system on January 1, 2002. (You may elect to change to it sooner than that if you feel it benefits you.) Please watch the news notices on our web page for further information about when registry services will be available. Pricing and billing Please remember the important billing changes coming up in September -- we've mentioned these in several newsletters in the past. Accounts will no longer automatically be charged a dormant rate if you don't use them. We came up with the dormant account some years ago for people who moved out of state or left MV for whatever reason: by keeping a dormant account at a low $5/month rate, those people could maintain email forwarding to new locations until they wanted to remove the MV account. Some others may want a dormant account for other reasons. We've never really made much mention of dormant accounts except to suggest it as an option for people moving -- it was an oversight on our part that it applied automatically to some others too! We're not getting rid of the dormant account: we're just making it so you need to set it to dormant explicitly. So if you have a dormant account and you want to keep it dormant, please contact us to make it so! (Note: look on your bill this month, if your dialup account description says "AutoDormant", you will have to set this to dormant if you want to keep it as a dormant account.) Starting with our September billing, we will be charging a $1 state- ment fee for any paper bill that we send. Both of us will benefit if we can bill you by email. The rules are fairly basic: * If you have selected email billing, and we bill you by email, there will be no statement fee. See http://home.mv.net/emailrequest to sign up now. * If you have selected paper billing, there will be a $1 fee added to the invoice. * If we have to bill you by paper billing for any other reason, we will also assess the $1 statement fee. We will, for example, need to send you a paper bill if the email invoice does not get paid and you accu- mulate a past due balance. Please visit our Terms and Conditions page for full information about our billing policies. ClariNet revisited We'd like to take a little space here for an update on the ClariNet newsgroups that we provide for you. For those unfamiliar with this ser- vice: you've probably noticed when you go to our web page (http://www.mv.com/) or the home page for our users (http://home.mv.net/) that there is a set of randomly selected news and sports photos (the "Clar- iNet Roulette" as we call it) with links to a corresponding story. These are samples from the ClariNet distribution that we carry. This distribu- tion is essentially a raw news service, containing real world news, techni- cal information, sports reports, business releases, editorials, photos, comics, and so forth. We purchase this service (and have since about February 1992) as a benefit for our customers. We receive it as Usenet news, coming into our news server as roughly a thousand groups composing the clari.* Usenet hierarchy. For those of you who don't use Usenet, or for those who would rather browse the articles on the web, we also turn the ClariNet articles into web articles and make them available to you at http://www.mv.com/clarinews/. When we started offering ClariNet, it was one of the few ways to get real newspaper-type content on the Internet (remember, this was pre-Web). But these days you might wonder, why would you want to read ClariNet news when there are so many professionally edited news sources out on the Inter- net these days? You can go to CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo, and others, and get your daily or hourly dose of news. In fact we're revisiting this question ourselves, as we find that only a handful of our users are making use of ClariNet now, and frankly since we pay for all users to have access, it seems to have a very low return for the money spent. But we do like the service and we'd rather see it get used than do away with it. So let's start by answering the question: why look at Clar- iNet when there are other sources out there? One answer (aside from the fact that when you read ClariNet, you get articles quickly, without having to download ads and the all the associated look and feel of whatever web site you go to), is that ClariNet gives you a lot more depth about individ- ual topics. With the big news sites, you'll get a good number of important news stories, and if something newsworthy happens in Qatar or East Timor or Bulgaria, you will read about it there. With ClariNet, there are always plenty of stories about those areas, on a day to day basis, whether or not it makes the network news. This truism carries over into other areas like technical and business news, and news from local regions of the US. In essence, ClariNet provides you with raw news divided into topics of inter- est. Although there are summaries of top stories in each major category, most of the information isn't edited and filtered, it's just there for you to see. It's really designed as a news source that you can dig into rather than a news summary product. If you have any thoughts about how the interface to ClariNet news might be made more useful, we'd love to hear it. Please write us at mv- qotm@mv.com -- but bear in mind that our taking any active editorial part in the management of this news is not practical, so don't ask. If you have strong opinions about whether we should keep it or not, let us know that too. New DSL areas available We are now able to offer DSL/C service in many Massachusetts towns as well as some towns in Connecticut. Please see our web page for a full list. While we are not focusing on these areas, we will service them on a word-of-mouth basis (perhaps you are moving and would like to keep using MV, or know someone in one of those areas that you would recommend us to). Bandwidth We are still awaiting an install date for our DS3 circuit to Genuity in Boston to provide us with the additional high-speed bandwidth that we mentioned in a prior newsletter. As of this writing there is a paperwork snag unrelated to us-- the equipment and fiber is physically in the build- ing, and once the carrier has the goahead the circuit should be up within a few weeks. New specials! From now through October 1 we are having a back to school special on new dialup accounts. Do you know a student who needs access? Do you know someone with a student going off to college that needs access to keep in touch with that student? Somebody who wants a new account for any reason? For new dialup accounts in this period, we'll only require $25 deposit instead of the usual $50. And instead of assessing a $10 setup fee and crediting the rest to the account, ALL of that deposit will be be used as a non-refundable initial payment. Do you have a business advertisement that mentions your MV account in any way? If your print ad has a reference to your domain, your website, or your email address hosted at MV, send a copy of it to us with your payment and we'll give you a $5 one-time credit on your account! (Only one such credit per account, even if you have different ads or different mentions.) MV Communications PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH 03108 (603) 629-0000 .