The Complete Idiots Guide to Newsgroups

[nhuloan]

http://www.angelfire.com/gundam/newsgroupguide/ <<--found another good guide here Edited February 11, 2006 by nhuloan

[ZileXa]

about legal/illegal,

if it was illegal, surely my ISP would have shutdown its newsserver!

I get good free newsserver from my ISP (actually they use Giganews).

If it truly was illegal, wouldn't mpaa and others let the ISP's disable newsserver acces?

most (large) illegal files like movies are posted on usenet and after that, it is that file thats being spread by torrents.

So newsservers are the source :)

[johngalt]

The legality of it has been debated many times over - basically, the current stance is that posters / sharers / providers are being targeted. But, downloaders are low on the totem pole.

Obviously, if you obtain software / media that you did not pay for, you *are* violating the copyright laws - then again, if there was a major crackdown on the newsgroups, Id be the first in line clamoring "foul!" - cause I am an old school Usenet users, and it is simply too worldwide to ever disappear anytime soon.

re: the problems with GrabIt - GrabIt does not decode MIME encoded files, and thus sometimes you will get text files. Funduc Software makes an Explorer Shell utility that easily will decode those files in not time flat.

However, text files (usually 0 length) can also occur with poorly-encoded Yenc files, as well as certain variants of .NZB files that are imported into GrabIt.

That all being said, I have a shemes.com account (naturally) and rarely get full length .txt files, with which I use the decode shell utility, and rarely ever use .NZB files as the SearchIt account I have is even faster and easier since it is all in the same interface. No importing to use or anything.

In defense of other products, though, there is a reason for them all - and it is a matter of choice. I stick with GrabIt b/c 99.9% of the time I don't encounter any of the problems that others do, and the interface is slyck, and it is free. Hard to argue with free. Especially since others are not free.

GrabIt has issues, don't get me wrong, such as the large group bug, the inability to relocate the cache folder, the .NZB import bug, and others, but overall it is slick - and free.

Oh, and Usenet is not necessarily in the top of the chain of command concerning posts - usually, IRC still gets them first.

Another good explanation and tutorial of the NGs can be found at The Slyck's Guide to Newsgroups. There is a lot of info out there on NGs, and it is all a matter of choice. My main focus now is to get GrabIt working better under Wine in Linux - sad, bu yes, I need to resort to a Win-app for Linux to grab my stuff. Go Figure.

[p858snake]

Why do I have to pay for that, isn't there any free alternatives?

if you want a basic client which you can take anywhere with you and you have a google account try google Groups[beta]

Australia - http://groups.google.com.au/

America/World-Wide - http://groups.google.com/

[riahc3]

Hmm....It would be better if there were accually free alternatives.

But thanks for the guide.

[max2]

SABnzbd is the best newsgroup client. Its free, does everything for you by seeing how many par files you need and only getting that amount. Then it extracts the files for you and deletes the left over achieve files if the extraction was successful only. Also you can set it to delete any leftover files within the completed extract folder like those pesky left over .par2 or .PAR2 files. It may beable to do only nzb files but who doesn't use nzb files when there are so many free nzb websites now! ? (http://www.newzleech.com/ http://www.binsearch.info/)

[virgo89]

Can some people list good nzb websites, where i can search for nzb's?

[virgo89]

^ fixed

another problem tho. i cant connect all 8 downloaders i can only have 2 on at a time

if i do check the other 6 they all say "Cant Connect to ISP"

[aggrophobik]

Maybe they only allow 2 concurrent connections...