A Telstra spokesperson said the telecommunications heavyweight had suspended access from Monday to Saturday last week as part of a package of measures designed to avert a "Usenet Death Penalty" threatened by the Usenet volunteer responsible for the area. Other measures included the suspension of several BigPond user accounts.
"We did take an additional measure to physically block the propagation to international groups," the spokesperson, Stuart Gray, said.
Telstra users were unable to post to international newsgroups for the duration of the disconnection.
Telstra has allowed the server to begin sending posts upstream again after technicians installed newsgroup spam prevention software on their server.
On the issue of spam in general, Gray says that Telstra will be getting tough.
"We are strengthening our spam policies going forward - we will be more vigilant in suspending spamming activity and monitoring for spamming activity," he said.
The extreme actions came after a United States-based volunteer for Usenet, David Ritz, called for an open discussion on imposing the Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) on Telstra which, if brought into effect, would see BigPond ISP users blocked from a raft of newsgroups worldwide.
Ritz had criticised Telstra for being unresponsive to calls for them to lift their game.
"All previous attempts at opening channels of communication have apparently fallen on deaf ears, including stern warnings that their failure to act against ongoing abuse issues would lead directly to this opening of formal [UDP] discussions," he said in a posted message.
Ritz said statistics indicated that over the past year, 60 percent of the articles posted to news-server.bigpond.net.au were spam.
Typical!! They (T(H)esltra), do nothing-->>>> "NOTHING", until someone with more clout they can't buy off and which they can't ignore, forces the issue. Their arrogance is almost unbelievable!