>Please note that on or around July 15, 2009, AT&T will no longer be
>offering access to the Usenet netnews service. If you wish to continue
>reading Usenet newsgroups, access is available through third-party
>vendors.
Here is a link to a news article about the closure
of access to the USENET forums by a number of big
ISP servers. That explains why activity to this and
other newsgroups has diminished in the past year
or so. Looks like USENET is going the way of the DoDo bird.