Seems like anything you want is already available for download through bittorrent. At, for me, that's how I download my public-domain e-books like "Dante's Inferno". That's pretty much all I've ever done. Yup. Public-domain works ONLY.

Whoohooo...now if I could only remember my Prodigy password.

Sk8terboy said:ummm . . . WHAT IS THIS?!?let me guess... you're 12 years old?

If you're just jumping into Usenet - almost as essential as a newsgroup server itself is a subscription to Newzbin. Newzbin essentially indexes Usenet binaries, so that instead of searching through groups yourself, you can just download one of their .nzb files which essentially contains links to specific newsgroup messages.

Also, while there are plenty of paid clients out there, Sanzbd+ is the best solution I've found, plus it's free, cross-platform and hardly uses any memory.

sonnyisthinkN said:they are failing their stress test

Only about 250 kB with a peak of 350 kB vs 800 kB normally.

hmm...

frenchylarue said:Usenet was once that, with a sense of humor. I remember when you could see all 24 newsgroups on an 80x25 monitor. Then it proliferated into hundreds, probably tens of thousands now, with infinite subspecialties. This was before Mosaic, (some other parrot-related program), and well before Netscape. I think I used the mosaic alpha back in the day. Ftp'ing and rlogins, telnetting before that. And well before the AOL crowd discovered Usenet.

I suspect you can find valuable groups of interest. You might have to dig for them a bit, but there are probably adequate tools for that now, rather than scrolling down an ASCII monitor.

I'm showing 88k groups in my newsreader. Most of those are from usenet but I've got 11 other servers set up also, I don't think they add more than a few thousand groups.

kreon360 said:Why are people suggesting to not use newsgroups? They are faster then torrents and you don't have to waste your upload bandwidth like with torrents.

you can easily disable the upload bitrate to nearly nothing, with any decent torrent software.

ughpaul said:Which is a real shame because a newsreader is such a superior tool for reading messages compared to using a web browser for web-based forums. with a newsreader you don't have to scroll through the same threads and messages you've already read to see the new posts. one of the newsgroups (USENET is also called newsgroups) best features is that most groups are unmoderated so you can discuss things that will never be allowed on web forums or censored by moderators - especially company sponsored forums.

there are still newsgroups that are very active and there are free news servers that offer free access to the text groups.

I definitely agree. It's superior for discussions so long as you don't need moderation. It's especially good for anyone on dial-up as you can do all the message retrieval as a block without waiting for each page to load--not to mention that since you get only the messages themselves and not all the rest of the junk that comprises a web page that it's faster.

osv1 said:kreon360 said:Why are people suggesting to not use newsgroups? They are faster then torrents and you don't have to waste your upload bandwidth like with torrents.

you can easily disable the upload bitrate to nearly nothing, with any decent torrent software.

Bitorrent is fast for popular things and you don't max out your speed instantaneously like usenet.