Little confused by usenet servers

[SonsOfLiberty]

I rarely look at headers, I look at size, if the size matches the installer size from the homepage (of the program) and an extra 30-60 mb for PAR's, then generally it's legit. You get more fakes from software than anything else....movies are the easiest to decide if there fake or real...

I personally use Newsleecher, it's in the NZB software section and it's fully working with super search, but it's to each his own.

Well here's everything about Usenet in guide form, go ahead and take a look around, it will answer alot of your questions.

http://www.binaries4all.com/

[zot]

Wasn't talking about free servers just free clients. As I mentioned I tried two different popular commercial clients newsleecher and newsbin and neither I truly liked. I actually played with alt.binz and I generally think it's pretty nice, although still pretty buggy. I think it will be great when it's working well later though. It did show alt.binaries.boneless but it didn't list an article count for it for some reason.

What exactly did you not like about Newsleecher and Newsbin? Too complicated? Too simple?

Did you use the free or "pay" version of alt.binz? Keep in mind that Alt.Binz does not do actual headers - it acts as a GUI for several binary search sites like Binsearch.info where you can browse posts made to a group (which is somewhat similar in concept to viewing headers) but remember that these "headers" you see are not coming from your actual NNTP server, but from the site's own usenet server (Binsearch.info uses Giganews, for example, which uses a different grouplist from Astraweb)

As far as newsreaders/binary-grabbers/NZB-downloaders go, what is "best" all depends on what is important to you - since each person has his own particular and unique needs.

For instance, I've found that, overall, Usenet Explorer has far more features and functions (for both text reading and binary posts) than anything else I've ever tried. However, it is also the hardest to learn, and in my opinion best suited for the true "power user".

If you fetch headers, for instance, Usenet Explorer fully supports Astraweb's XZVER/XZHDR header compression (as well as Highwinds own implementation) in addition to Stunnel's standard zlib SSL wrapper. So you can download headers in a fraction of the time as uncompressed streams will take. Newsbin Pro currently ranks second to Usenet Explorer in compressed header support. (No other client currently offers this feature, but Newsleecher promises to offer it in their next major release.)

Conversely, if you are looking for something very easy to learn, and you mainly just download popular movies from NZB sites (especially if you want to watch or preview them as well as download) then a simple NZB downloader like NZB Player might be the ideal solution.

So I would suggest trying out several "newsreaders" to see what suits your needs best (and how much time you want to spend learning the software).

The free version of alt.binz (o.25) is rather outdated, and many of its search engines no longer work. Grabit is free and easy to learn, but not up to current standards (and easily crashes downloading big header groups) Some "pay" clients can of course be used for free almost indefinitely (I've been doing this with Usenet Explorer recently - which I use mainly for the compressed headers)

Slyck has a long list of news clients here: http://www.slyck.com/programs.php?cat_id=1