Page 1 of So, who uses Newsgroups?

I`m looking for something and I`ve been told the best place to look may be Newsgroups as opposed to P2P etc.
Been told about xnews and smartpar but don`t really know how everything works.
Apparently there`s loads of stuff stored on your own ISP`s (NTL in my case) servers.
Can anyone enlighten me on how they work exactly and a good starting place/software? Also got winrar.

Ste

There is a vast amount of stuff to download on newsgroups :)

You may however find that you own ISP`s service doesn`t have good retention, as the costs in providing a good binary newsfeed are astronomical!

I have a separate Claranews account which I use, and I use program called Newsshark to download from them, simply scan the new headers (posts), tag the ones you want, add to the batch and download them.

You`ll need Winrar to decompress most files, but MP3 comes down native. SmartPar is ESSENTIAL. A PAR set allows you to rebuld corrupt or missing parts of a post - news postings are usually smallish and a cd iso image will contain say 50 x 21mb parts, each of which is maybe 500kb. Newsahrk will download them all and generate the RARS and PARS for you, then use smartpar to verify that the resulting RAR files are complete before uncompressing. I always download the PAR files and check out RARs.

When you first run Newsshark, you point it at your news server (address from your ISPs support pages) and it downloads a list of groups. Browse the "binaries" groups and pick the ones you want to scan. If you`re on a modem link scanning will take ages, but it`s quick on DSL.

You`ll also need a big hard disc :) 3.5gb per day on DSL soon eats up drives!

easynews is also a good one. You can just download stuff direct from the website. Dont have to bother with news readers etc

Thanks both.
Haven`t looked at easynews yet. Still seems complicated..
The newsshark app demo is quite limited. Only 15 at a time. Is it available elsewhere?
Anyone know of any guides etc?

Ste

I use newgrabber... have a search for tha

Ste wrote:
Anyone know of any guides etc?

A good FAQ can be found at www.timdoc.com.
You can download it in zipped format. It covers all the basics.