What do people think about indexing sites who charge?

[jaymmmmmm]

Just cirious about what people think about nzb indexing sites charging VIP and the bigger picture.

I’m not talking about sites ike binsearch.info, yabal, nzbindex.nl, newzleech etc. I’m talking about the ones like merlinsportal, nzbmatrix, nzbsrus and applies to others in the past like newzbin. Who charge people to download nzbs. (I know they have free memberships but they’re very limited)

Most members don’t understand the way usenet work so assume that who ever uploads the 1mb nzb is the person actually uploading the multiple gigabytes of tv episodes, games, movies etc.
When really they all come from the efnet channels and the websites, like binaries4ever, usenet4all, realmom and the channels #a.b.teevee, #a.b.moovee, #a.b.games.xbox360, #a.b.games.wii .I know there are loads more channels and websites who upload new content to usenet but just listing the most popular/well known ones.

These channels make no money and are all set up through the owners back pocket paying the fees each month to keep the channel running with the bots etc. Websites which upload the content have advertising but make hardly any money compared to the indexing sites.

So these indexing sites are listing other peoples content they’ve uploaded, which is the reason they get new members, so they can download all this new stuff. When the actual memebrs/staff of these websites and irc channels are the actual ones uploading all the content to usenet. Only to have their posts uploaded on these indexing sites to have memebrs be charged to download them. And the channels, websites delibratly don’t put any passwords on them but could you blame them if they started to? To only let members from the respected comminities download them. There would be a massive cry from the indexing sites about it, but like I said for people who understand the way usenet works could you really blame them? Passwording the content THEY UPLOAD.

I just think it’s wrong to charge people for VIP on indexing sites, they should all be free to download and follow the chain like the nzb section here , making it free to download what you want and how ever many nzbs you want regardless of size. They would get more members = more money from advertising which would probably work out the same if they charged for VIP which is less members.

Doesn't seem fair imo that these sites who list other peoples content they’ve uploaded to usenet get money while the actual people who upload them don’t.

[chakara]

Why in hell would anybody password an upload is beyond me (aside from those A-holes doing it for money).
The point is sharing : just upload and let whoever donwload. Who cares ?

I'm quite new on usenet and haven't uploaded much yet (around 200Go over 4-5 months) but I would never password my uploads !
I use clear, understandable names so that everyone looking for those files will find them easily.
Who cares if the nzb is uploaded on nzbmatrix ?
Who cares if I don't get a thank you ?
Who cares about any of that ?

Deciding to password uploads to fight paying sites would be stupid and catastrophic to filesharing through usenet. If people use newsgroups it's because they're tired of this "I own my files and you need to be one of us to get it" private trackers stupid mentality. Don't do the same on usenet !

[zot]

All good points made. I'll just add that one possible advantage of having a pay site might be having money to fight a lawsuit. A lot of sites fold upon getting that first legal threat, as fighting in court is not cheap. Of course, putting up a legal fight is, in my opinion, only delaying the inevitable loss in the end. (and even if they take it to the Supreme Court and win, the copyright cartel will simply get the law changed.)

I generally don't like paysites. The thing I hate most is that none of them ever start out as paysites, or even announce their intention to become pay-sites in the future. Several times in the past I've felt like I've been stabbed in the back when a originally-free site that I've contributed to has gone pay - and I've been left with zero for all the time and effort that I've spent building up the site's list of file releases - and then having to pay someone to access the very material I donated myself for free.

[darkstate01]

They are feeding off leechers and don't deserve any respect.
What do they do to deserve to be paid?
People are basically paying to download illegal films/music/programs etc that will never belong to them legally , and the site is profiting for this act.
I will never and never have paid for any site that works in this way, they have no respect in my world.
If they come back with the nonsense reply of they need the cash to run the server and updating the databases etc, setup a website that isn't selling illegal software/films etc, because that's what they are making leechers pay for at the end of the day.
Greedy greedy blood suckers. This is one of the reasons why the whole file sharing world is in the crossairs of the mpaa riaa etc.

[hdjunky]

No one makes anyone pay the fee. It is your choice if you want to sit and use headers and update them every hour right? That is free. People are paying for the convenience of easy searching, so they pay premium prices. Why do you pay a premium and go out to eat when you can easily make it at home for little money? Why dont you leech off the free news servers and put up with there reliability instead of paying premium prices? The whole situation is like everything else in life. Think of it simply as a premium fee that you wish to utilize.

Computers take money to run to to serve websites. Sure it may make sense to give away the service for free to a few hundred-thousand visitors a day...but when it several thousand visitors a day AT LEAST expenses start to mount quickly.

[c0ld]

There is a massive difference in the cost of running a server that just uploads files to usenet and ones that index the contents of usenet.

A typical irc bot will serve nzbs to 1-200 people, whilst recieving then uploading files from a handful. You could run that operation on a single dedicated OVH server.

Now, take newzbin as an example of an indexer; try downloading the headers for all (15k +) of the groups onto your local machine and you'll get a feel for the hard drive space required. But all that needs to be on multiply redundent scsi drives, stored in an SQL database capable of dealing with 100s-1000s of querys a minute, along with updates every 10 minutes. Then you need add space for the condensed header information, information that your CPUs have to parse themselves, which takes serious processor power. Add to that another related DB with all the reports and a reporting system.. It all adds up.

Other providers, like binsearch, will ditch a significant number of groups and a significant amount of header information. Others like matrix have choosen to act as a glorified file dump for nzb files, but those files are still indexed in large SQL databases that require significant resources.

Your comparison just doesn't stack up. In fact it's akin to asking why Astraweb and Giganews charge money when they don't even provide the files.

[Wwwildthing]

This is a list of the Top 30 newsgroups on Giganews servers as of March 2008.



Do you really want to download all those headers... and then update it with another 5TB (terabyte) the next day?

This is why you download nzb's... and why you might pay a premium for the convenience of doing so.

[heiska]

There are still free nzb indexes with no advertising at all and with owners who refuse to take any donations.

That's what I call generous.

Btw, an interesting reply from the guy behind nzbindex.nl:

Hi Christian,

Let me breefly explain you how this works. To index the usenet groups, we make use of a combination of professional software and our own indexing tool. The application that is responsible for indexing usenet was first build in 2006 as a try-out. This application is evolved over the last 4 years to a fast and stable tool, optimized to handle the enormous amount of usenet information. The final steps are to store the information in a traditional database and make it searchable for you guys!

Just to give you some numbers:
- usenet contains over 100 million articles per day (which must be downloaded, analyzed and stored) and this number is still growing
- the header information is about 30 GB per day
- which is over 8 TB downloadable data per day

Rolf

Nice 30GB of headers per day

[c0ld]

Tbh, I've aways wondered how the likes of nzbs.org, binsearch and nzbindex.nl do it. Imo binsearch has backing from giganews, but that's a guess based on the lack of any other adverts on the site. Perhaps others are privately funded by other usenet providers with vested interests too, although you would think there'd be some advertising. You'd have to be very well off to run an index site as a hobby.

[Darth_Duane]

I was a big fan of Newzbin mainly for the comments that let me avoid bad downloads, but I have been using super search in newzleecher and it's been working just fine so I doubt I'll go back if they reopen or someone opens a clone with the code.