My view of the trial so far is qute poor. Server is quick. Retention is quite good. Completion is **** poor (which negates the good retention as theres little point retaining half posts).
Also I've found a couple of newsgroups that on the trial server seem to have little activity yet I'm seeing GB's a day on the same groups via ClaraNews.
alt.binaries.multimedia.babylon5 seems particularly poor on the trial server suffering from both extremely poor completion and terrible 'up to dateness'. EG a recent Babylon 5 Season 1 DVD 5 posting is showing as fully complete on Claranews (400 + files) yet there's at best 3 dozen files on the trials server and all bar one are incomplete. Claranews also has a complete posting of Babylon 5 Season 1 DVD 6 (a few incompletes but not many) yet the trials server has no files, only a couple of Par2's.
I'm also disappointed that NTL haven't returned to a full news service with these trials but I understand this isn't a choice made by the trials team.
Looks like I'll be keeping my ClaraNews account for the forseeable future
