Usenet / Newsgroups FAQ

Usenet, also known as newsgroups is the best way to download new releases. It works in the following manner, every new newsgroup server, must connect to all the other ones across the world, when something is posted, no matter where, it will be instantly copied to all newsgroups servers there are. Each newsgroup server has a different capacity, which determines how long it will hold the files, as new files are posted; old ones are deleted to make room. A high quality pay newsgroup server, will be able to hold files for about a week, while most ISP based free newsgroup servers will hold it for a day or two. However, ISP ones provide a faster connection as you are downloading files directly from your ISP, which will actually allow you to experience downloads at the full speed your modem supposedly posses for the first time.

The first step is to find the newsgroup server address you will be using. Ask your ISP, or check its website, or if its program automatically set up a newsgroups account in your E-mail program you can look in it to see what it is. For AT&T broadband users for example it is “netnews.attbi.com”, If your ISP does not provide it, you may pay for one, since my does provide me with it I don’t know which are good and which aren’t, ask around if you want.

The second step is to get the program Xnews from http://xnews.newsguy.com/ It is the best program to view newsgroups, mail servers such as outlook are completely useless as they can only view the texts of messages and cannot decode the actual files. Xnews supports the latest encoding technique, yEncoding, which is what all posters use. Once you start the program, you need to set it up, set up a new newsgroups server in the “Server name or address” bar. And then give an alias, the alias is whatever name you want to give so it will be easy for you to recognize so it doesn’t matter which you put in.
Some, especially pay news servers, will require a username and password, however, most ISP based ones do not, as it is built so that only people connecting through that ISP will have access to it in the first place…
Once you connect to the newsgroup server you will notice there are a whole bunch of “rooms” or “topics”, you can subscribe to topics, you do not need to subscribe for any practical reason except for the fact that you can set it to filter all non subscribed topics, that way you don’t have to sift through all the topics each time, but can look at a neat list of those useful for you. The rooms are divided into four main categories, the first has no prefix, the others do, and we only need to bother with the alt.binaries category, which is reserved for file sharing and is the newest of all, you can type in the filter alt.binaries, and look through them and see what good ones you find to subscribe to.

Some suggested rooms from me are:
alt.binaries.anime
alt.binaries.anime.tenchi
alt.binaries.anime.vcd
alt.binaries.multimedia.anime
alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.repost
alt.binaries.sounds.anime
alt.binaries.sounds.jpop
alt.binaries.pictures.anime
alt.binaries.hentai
alt.binaries.hentai.sailor-moon
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.anime
alt.binaries.games

Although the last one isn’t anime related, it’s quite awesome as all the newest and not so new games are periodically posted there as CD images, in fact it is almost always CD images and not annoying rips, so you get everything including movies and sound and updates, be aware though that there is nothing preventing an idiot from posting, and games may be ripped badly and will just be unplayable (remember they have protection), the same goes for a movie as well of course, the movie can be corrupted, badly encoded, etc.

You are now ready to download files from the newsgroups. To download, first you should click the T icon on the bottom, left click to thread or unthread, also if you left click it retains the last filter you set for it, to remove that right click on it instead, threading is because each post is limited in size, that is why there is yEncoding, you select all the posts that go together, or simply the file name if its threaded and select decode to a certain dir, to decode files add them to queue, using space bar, and then click F4. If no files are in the queue, clicking F4 will add all selected files to queue and then begin the download. When you Thread files, you will notice next to each file there is an icon, a directory icon means that’s all text messages between people and replies, if there is a paper icon, it means the file is small enough to be composed of a single post, if it is 4 light blue boxes it means that is a complete file. If it is 3 dark blue boxes it means the file is missing some of its parts, those CANNOT be downloaded separately and from topics. You must download each file in one go, if you stop in the middle you have to start over. Some files obviously become corrupt, that is why there are parity files, error checking, and split file postings.

Most files are posted as split rars, you will usually have 20+ rar files per ep, each 5-10 MB and each made up of 20-40 posts, don’t be afraid of the gigantic number of posts, it is natural. Rars will be found in two formats, one is where the first file has the ending .rar and the rest are .r##, that’s old version rar, that can be extracted by most common applications. However some posts will have the endings .part#.rar where the # can represent a single or multiple digits, those are new rar version 3 files, they start with .part1.rar and go up and can only be decompressed by the new rar program (WinZip and WinAce can’t do it) which can be found on http://www.rarlab.com/

As I said before sometimes file are corrupt, you can often look on other topics to see if you can find a good version of the corrupt file, ask for a repost, or wait for someone else to do so, also for those occasions there are two programs often used. The first is quickSFV which can be found on http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Mouse/4668/
Many posts will include a .sfv file, which is a file that can be opened by quick SFV and used to verify if there are missing or damaged files and remembers which files were already validated. However it cannot repair files.
The second program, which is truly amazing, it is called SmartPar which can be found on http://www.disc-chord.com/smartpar/ this nifty little program can both verify file integrity like quickSFV, although it is a bit slower, and can also recover files. Smart par used a .par file which contains a list of the files you are supposed to have, it created a .tmp file with the info of what files were previously validated, in addition it has the amazing feature of being able to recover files, by linking the files you’re transferring with mathematical formulas, it is capable of restoring missing files, if you have more or the same amount of parity files then missing files (parity files are labeled p##, the .par file doesn’t count however, but is required for it and is the only file that can be opened by the SmartPar software). For example, if you downloaded the 30 rar files of Movie, and 3 are corrupted, then you need to download three of the p## files, no matter which (so it can be p01,p02,p03, or it can be p02, p04,p05 etc.), and it will be able to restore the three missing files, it doesn’t matter which of the thirty were missing, however if you only have two parity files and are missing 3 rar files, then it can restore none, think of it as multi variable function solving, if you have enough equations you can solve for all of them, but if not then you can solve none. It works as if each parity file is a gigantic multivariable equation and each file is a gigantic variable (Which I suspect is how it really does work because they give this analogy in the website).

Lastly, you can block posts by certain user by plonking them, which is done by selecting a message and clicking on plonk sender.

To sum up the programs you need are (they are all posted in the above post, just not as neatly as here):

Xnews (Browsing program) - http://xnews.newsguy.com/

WinRar Version 3 (only program capable of extracting the newer rar files) - http://www.rarlab.com/

quickSFV (File integrity verifying) - http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Mouse/4668/

SmartPar (File integrity verifying & recovery of missing/bad files) - http://www.disc-chord.com/smartpar/

[MaRyuSama]

First off ... I'd like to say .. don't blame me if you don't understand ^_^


Step #1:
Find a newserver...
you can't use newsgroups without a newserver ...

check you ISP(Internet service Provider)'s homepage , or call them
to see if they provide you with a newserver with your interenet subscription.

If they don't your going to have to find a 3rd Party Newserver ...
to which you will have to pay a monthly fee it varries on who you use

http://www.easynews.com <--good newserver from what I've heard


If you find a free 3rd party newserver ... don't count on them having binaries... most free ones are for text based groups only ...

Step #2
Get a newsreader program... it won't help you much to have a server
with no way to access it...

Xnews is a free newsreader downloadable for http://www.download.com

Xnews is pretty straight forward in its use

When you start the program for the first time it will ask you for your newserver address and then an Alias for the Newserver to be named.

EX
mynewserver.myisp.net
My gateway to anime

It will then pop with a configuration for you if you would like to ever post in the future, things like what to display for your Nick and your e-mail.

After confirming your settings Xnews will ask to retrieve all the newsgroups your server carries. LET IT!

Step 3
Using Xnews

... After thats done. Browse through your Newsgroups and see what ones your newserver carries.

Ones of Interest will be:

alt.binaries.anime
alt.binaries.multimedia.anime
alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.repost
alt.binaries.sounds.anime
oh and if you looking for hentai ...
alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.anime

Ok if you have one(or more) of those groups it would be good to right click and choose 'subscribe' from the drop down menu on the ones you have .. so when Xnews does start it will start with those Newsgroups ready for you to check.

Ok now all you have to do is Double click on a newsgroup to open a window for you to check whats posted. The program might pop up with 2 slider bars the top one should be set all the way to the left and the bottom one set all the way to the right and then hit ok. Now let the program retrieve all the headers.

Ok once this is done and the headers have been threaded you can easily tell if a post is complete ...
Complete posts have = A Cyan Cube beside them
Incomplete posts have = A dark Blue Cube missing a part

To select the files you want just highlight them and hit space bar
and when your ready do download them you can hit 'F4' to start the process. And now you just have to wait for it to get done .. you can go back to the list of subscribed newsgroups by hitting the Bar that has the alias you set for what your newserver was called. To open another group just double click it and go through the header retrieval process again .. Xnews only allows 1 connection per newsgroup .. so you can't open two alt.binaries.anime windows ... dependent upon your newserver they may restrict the number of active connections you can have to them .. so once you get an error message for opening a bunch of groups ... then you'll know your limit if it wasn't posted on the page you got your newserver from.

Additional useful Knowledge

PARS

PAR files are parity recovery files to recover posts if just a few pieces are missing. You can only recover a rar set if you have an amount of pars equal to the amount of missing Data.

EX
4 Pars and 4 Missing rars = Recoverable
2 Pars and 3 Missing rars = Non-Recoverable

To use Par files get Smart PAR from
http://www.disc-chord.com/smartpar/

What the usenet/newsgroups are

The Usenet/Newsgroups are a collection of servers ... Theres a main server for the newsgroups ... Which your ISP or Newserver then subscribes to , to get the posts that ppl send. These posts go onto your servers , server(s) so that you or others with the same newservice are the only ones with access to the files your ISP/Newserver has.

Sometimes a newserver has problems and misses posts ... so if someone says they have something on there newserver but you can't find it on yours .. this is why they're using a different server that either got the post originally when yours failed or if its older there newserver likely has a longer retention span.

Retention Span = The Amount of Time/# of Posts , that a newserver keeps posts.

Retention Spans vary greatly ... Easynews Has a 52 day retention span .. while I only have a 2-3 day retention span from my Newserver .. while my friend with a different isp has a Rentention span of about a week.

Posting/Requesting Eddicit
If you post to a newsgroup .. please make sure your request is on topic and make sure to be polite in your request. Here are some useful accronyms for Newsgroups.

ATTN = Attention
REQ = Request
TIA = Thanks in Advance

and thats about all I think you need to know ... if you have questions .. I guess you could ask me here or in the Hub.

aah.. iformation.. mm.. I like dat *nOoB* o_0