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How to download anything (like anime) using Newsgroups/Usenet (tutorial for beginners)

Newsgroups-Tutorial-Header

Author: TheSa|nt from Animevortex.net and Grauw from abma (alt.binaries.media.anime)

Even if just a $1, If you find my tutorial helpful, please:
🙂

Being an anime-related domain, this site (naturally) gets a LOT of requests on how to find/download fansubs via newsgroups. Also, anime will be the key example in this tutorial due to the legality of other topics. You can replace “anime” in this tutorial with whatever you like (movies, music, etc), but that is your own preference and decision.

Recently I posted on a very quick tutorial on how to use easynews for newsgroups. However, there are other ways to more thoroughly explore newsgroups via desktop-based applications. A long time ago, Grauw developed a wonderful tutorial on how to do this, but through time a lot of it had become outdated. So I have gone through and created a new version of the tutorial to better cover today’s practices, features, and additional facts. This will act as the advanced guide on how to dive into the deep end and get crazy with it!

Even though I tried to summarize this as much as possible, the tutorial is still a bit lengthy and might be intimidating when looking at it but trust me when I say “it’s easy!”. It just has to be put into enough words to help even those who have been living under a rock 😉 — Now after reading this, if you are still missing anything, it should be easy to pick it up on your own through messing around. If I went over every possible detail on the usage of newsgroups, this tutorial would literally go on forever.

Let me start off by stating that fansubs are made by fans, for fans, for free, and should only be downloaded until that specific series reaches the US. Once the series has reached the US and has been “licensed” here, it is frowned upon like downloading anything else (movies, music, etc). So if you like it, and it’s licensed, check out the anime sections on amazon.com or dvdplanet.com and pay for it so the companies related can make their money, and bring you more stuff!

So, first of all, what is usenet? I think usenet can be explained best as being a huge worldwide forum, or a mailing list. You can send email-like messages to certain groups on that forum, and people all over the world having access to usenet can then read those messages and discussions. Unlike mailing lists, they have an ordered forum-like structure, and you can select which messages you want to download based on the subject. There are so-called ‘binaries’ newsgroups too, and to those, you can send emails with attachments, and that’s exactly what happens in the anime binaries newsgroups, people post messages with anime attached to them on those groups.

Now, what is so great about usenet compared to other places you can get anime from, like IRC, Direct Connect or FTP? Well…

  1. The newsgroup knows no queues, there has to be only one person to post a file and everyone else can get it at once,
  2. The newsgroup’s server is local, so your download speed is not limited to another user’s upload speed, and
  3. On the newsgroup new releases are posted only hours after their initial release on IRC, some fansub groups even have a member making sure the latest fansubs are posted on usenet immediately.

As you can see, newsgroups are quite cool ^_^. And if you are looking for a specific anime or episode, you can always try and post a request on the newsgroup.

Usenet is not concentrated on one site, one server. On the contrary, it is a huge distributed network of servers all over the world. If you post a message to your server, it gets distributed by the so-called ‘news feed’ to all the other servers. This means you download all messages and attachments from a local server. The big advantage of this is that the downloads will be fast. The disadvantage of this is that your ISP has to offer this service in order for it to be free. If your ISP does not offer newsgroup services (which is becoming more common these days), then you have to subscribe to a separate paid service. There are also huge differences in quality, and which newsgroups are offered. Some news servers don’t carry the binaries groups at all because of the huge amount of data traffic that those generate, and some news servers do carry them, but there they are barely useful because the server space is limited and the messages get deleted within the hour after they are posted, or posts aren’t received completely. So make sure you look for these features.

The usenet is a very broad network covering a huge amount of groups, and all those groups together make up for a huge amount of messages. You can find just about anything through newsgroups. Fortunately, a lot of newsgroups have got some users which are trying their best to keep things at least a little organized, some newsgroups are even moderated (meaning a certain user must read and approve all messages before they get posted). The anime newsgroups are not, however, there are some tight rules which can be read in The FAQ, and people consistently not obeying those rules can count on comments from other users and end up being *PLONK*ed by most readers of the newsgroup (meaning being put on their ignore list).

A keyword to also learn is “retention”. This means simply “the amount of time in which posts remain on the server in which you connect through”. About 5-10 years ago, retention periods used to be about two weeks to a month. Once it passes that period, you would no longer be able to search for those posts. So if someone posted say…10 episodes of Gundam Wing and 1-3 of those episodes were posted beyond the retention period by the time you decided to search for them, you would only find 4-10 when searching. Thankfully, in this tutorial I will be providing examples of services to use that have around 1700+ days of retention (so no worries of that).

How to get access to usenet

First of all, you should check if your provider provides access to newsgroups. Look at your provider’s homepage, and see if they offer a newsgroup server (the address often starts with news. or nntp.). Providers tend to hide information like this a little, so often it can be found easiest by searching their website for ‘usenet’ or ‘newsgroups’. If they do, you should try to find out if they also host binaries newsgroups, and if their retention-time is acceptable. If you can’t find this out from your provider’s homepage, it’s advised you move on by looking into external paid-for services as the ISP may give you a hard time if you call them about it (they used to be flexible about it). Paid-for services may cost a little monthly, but it’s absolutely worth it. They tend to have MUCH faster speeds and greater retention.

Here are a few examples of recommended newsgroup services:

  • Newhosting — Has a retention period of 4000+ days, cheap plans (anyone can afford these), unlimited downloads, unlimited speed, multiple connections, SSL encryption support.
  • Easynews — Has a retention period of 4000+ days, cheap plans (anyone can afford these), unlimited downloads/speed, SSL support, and also has a nice web interface if you don’t want to go through all the trouble of setting up a news application.

Once you have sorted out if you will use your slower yet free ISP’s services (if offered), or a speedy/flashy paid-for service…you will end up with a server address and login that you will use to access newsgroups with.

Now it’s time to access it. For that, you need a newsreader. Outlook Express/Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail offers newsgroup access, but is very unsuitable for binary newsgroups. I strongly recommend you to use NewsBin Pro, NewsLeecher or Xnews (the first two are shareware, while Xnews is free). Newsbin Pro and Newsleecher are the best of the three where Xnews is limited but in this case “you get what you pay for”. Newsbin Pro (when bought) comes with upgrades for life which is nice. Personally I haven’t used Newsleecher in years so I won’t be covering it much in the instructions (you may want to visit their website for detailed how-to’s in accessing the features within it). Also, the directions explained here for these applications may or may not be completely accurate since I might be using a different version that you are (and menu/option locations can sometimes move around).

Install the newsreader and start it up. First, you’ve got to create an account (server/identity in Xnews, and preferences/server options in Newsbin). Fill in the address/login of your usenet server at the appropriate place, and then fill in some (nick)name under which you want to post messages and some bogus email address. Why that, you may ask? Well, a lot of spammers scan the newsgroups for email addresses, and you don’t want that. You can actually do several things, you can use a bogus email address or you can also use an email address of a free email service like Hotmail or something, and you can also use a maimed version of your real email address, like for example myemail_AT_h0t(remove_this)mail.c0m, which can be figured out by a human but which can’t be understood by a spam bot which scans for email addresses. It’s up to you.

Now you have to ‘subscribe’ yourself to some of the newsgroups, meaning you’ll have to decide which newsgroups you want to read. Usually, a client offers to download a list of all newsgroups from your server. This can take quite a while since there are an awful lot of newsgroups, but when that’s done you can easily search through them and look for newsgroups which suit you. Good newsreaders (like the ones we discussed) also offer the possibility to manually add newsgroups without downloading the whole list, this is useful if you already know the newsgroups you want to subscribe to. I have also heard of occasions where a group, which didn’t appear in the list, could still be accessed when you added it manually. So that’s perhaps also worth a try if you can’t find the anime newsgroups. In Xnews, the group overview is shown when you select a server (right-click on it for options, amongst others manual add), and in Newsbin the group options dialog can be found in the preferences menu.

The names of newsgroups consist of a few keywords, separated by dots. They are typically ordered in a hierarchy… A few examples:

comp.sys.* – contains newsgroups about several computer systems (for example comp.sys.msx)
alt.* – contains newsgroups on the most varying number of subjects
alt.binaries.* – contains all newsgroups in which binaries can be posted

Take a look at groups.google.com for a good overview of all non-binaries newsgroups (and also a very good newsgroup search engine and archive).

Anyways, the newsgroups we are interested in are

  • alt.binaries.anime
  • alt.binaries.multimedia.anime
  • alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.repost
  • alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.d

And perhaps also

  • alt.binaries.anime.vcd
  • alt.binaries.anime.dvd
  • alt.binaries.dragonball
  • alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.raw
  • alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.highspeed
  • alt.binaries.sounds.anime
  • alt.binaries.sounds.jpop
  • alt.binaries.pictures.anime

Please note that when people are talking about a certain newsgroup, their names are often shortened like this: abma, abma.repost (or abmar), abma.d, etc. And here abma is obviously short for alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.

The first two are more or less the same, a lot of messages posted to abma are also posted to aba, and vice versa, but there are always some messages which are posted to only one of those, so it’s still wise to read both of them. Abma is the most active of the two. The repost group carries files which have already been posted before, and are reposted because some people didn’t get them right, or for the new users who have joined the usenet anime community since then.

Once you’ve subscribed to a few newsgroups (I suggest you start out with abma only), you are ready to start downloading… Proceed to the next chapter!

Download Files

First of all, before ever trying to post to a newsgroup yourself, make sure to find that newsgroup’s website so that you can read their rules/faqs. This way you don’t break any rules and find yourself ignored or on a ban list. But that’s for posting, what we are looking for at this moment is downloading!!!

Now, how to download stuff… In XNews, if you double-click on one of the subscribed groups, a big window opens up, and the reader will probably ask you if you want to download all message headers (read: the subject lines). It does that because the number of messages in binary newsgroups is usually extremely large. Just download them all, which may take a few minutes, and in the meantime read the next part of this guide. Next time, if a window pops up asking you which headers to retrieve (it’s the same as ‘open special’ in the right-click menu), take the start position a small bit before where the retrieved bar ends, the end position at the end, and select the Retrieve but EXclude read articles option.

In Newsbin it’s a fair lot easier, first go to preferences/options and set the first time records option to some high number, for example, 500,000 (unless you don’t want to download all headers the first time you visit a group, as more headers means a longer download time), and then just double-click on the group you want to download. Note that you can also mix a number of groups (I usually take aba, abma and abmar in one go) by selecting more than one, and selecting download latest from the right-click menu.

For Newsleecher……..well I don’t know as I haven’t used it for years 🙂 So if anyone wants to add their 2 cents, just share your comment and I will add the information here (giving credit to you).

Before we continue I will have to explain some things about binary messages on usenet. Because of several reasons (amongst others the fact that usenet was originally only designed for text messages, and that those can’t become too long in usenet’s current design) files are converted to text, and split into several smaller segments. You can recognize a segment because it has (x/y) somewhere in its subject line, where x is the number of the current segment, and y is the total number of segments. Fortunately, as an end-user, you don’t have to deal with those segment numbers because your newsreader already does (except for Outlook Express/Windows Mail, and that’s why it sucks so much for binaries). So basically the newsreader will look for all the posts related to the file in question and group them together so you see one line of information….the file you are looking for. When downloading that file, it automatically adds ALL related posts to your download queue and gets to work.

These segments can be ‘encoded’ in three different ways. First, uuencode and base64, which convert the files to all characters (and vice versa), which unfortunately adds 40% overhead (meaning they transmit 40% more bytes than the files actually are). If you see a lot of garbage text it’s probably a segment of an unencoded binary. Second, there is the new yEnc encoding system, which is now supported in all major newsreaders (except for Outlook Express/Windows Mail). yEnc uses the fewer limitations today’s usenet has, and barely adds any overhead, and in addition to that also adds an error check and a sequence number. So if there is a file posted both in uuencode and yEnc, it’s best that you download the yEnc one because that one will be downloaded about 40% faster (for example in about 45 minutes instead of an hour).

Now you’re probably thinking….wtf man, that sounds confusing as hell! Good! It means you are human and guess what…you really don’t have to worry about it. Today’s quality newsreaders pretty much come preset to the way you need them, and most files now are posted very consistently. The application handles the rest. I just kept that part in from Grauw’s old tutorial because it sounded great!!

Before you go on, you have to select a directory where you want to download the files to. In Xnews, choose Special/Setup Xnews from the menu, and then go to the Files tab. There, set the save directories to the desired value. In Newsbin, go to Preferences/Options/Download Path. What’s great about Newsbin, is within its settings you can choose for it to automatically create subdirectories based on different variables. For example, the name of the newsgroup the files came from, the name of the nzb file it came from (I’ll go over NZB files later), or the name of an artist/album (I won’t be going over downloading music or anything outside of anime but I’m sure you will figure it out on your own).

When the downloading of the message headers finishes, you’ll see a huge list of subjects. Make your window’s size as large as possible, because some subjects tend to become a little long, and order them by subject (click on the “subject” bar). In Xnews you can remove the text field at the bottom by pressing F12, and if a subject line is too long you can either hover over it or press F11 once to widen the subject area, and F11 again to go back to the original width. In Newsbin you can also hover over the subject, scroll around, adjust the screen, etc. In Newsbin you can also adjust if the subject will include the full detail or just file names.

Now, in Xnews, every message has an icon beside it. Note that if all icons are images of notepads, and you see only a huge lot of resembling messages, then probably the threaded view is off. In that case click on the “T” in the toolbar at the bottom, next to the search box. A notepad means it’s just a single message, a folder icon means that it’s a thread of messages (a message with replies), and some small blue boxes mean that it’s a ‘multipart’ message, where the binary is, as said before, divided into multiple segments. If these boxes are bright blue, all segments are available on the server. If they are dark blue and incomplete, then not all parts are available yet. In that case, maybe the post is still in progress, or maybe a few parts just got ‘lost’. Unfortunately, that is one of the downsides of usenet, it’s quite unreliable. However there are ways to recover those files, I will talk about that later. You can see how many of the segments are available in the lines column.

In Newsbin all messages also have icons. An open box means that it’s just a regular part, a yellow box with an I in it means it’s an incomplete file meaning it is missing one or more segments (only shows up if ‘show incomplete posts’ is enabled, which you should), a green notepad means you have already downloaded the file, and a blue R means the message is ignored by the filter (the latter two only show up if you enable ‘ignore filters’). Newsbin’s default filters (they probably need a little tweaking) may try to filter out all messages which are not files and some more, so that’s why so many messages are filtered out (depends on which version you are using). If the background of a message is green that means that it has newly arrived during the last header download. In the size column you can see the size of a part, and the number of segments it is made of.

Now, look at the subject lines and choose a post you want to download. Please note that almost all posts are divided into smaller RAR parts to make it easier to recover/repost them if they’re damaged. Also in most cases .PAR2 or .PAR/.P01/.P02/etc. files are posted with the RAR files, those can be used to recover them. More on this later, for now, you just want to download the RAR files. If there are PAR2 files available, download the .par2 file and the .vol01+02.par2 file, and if any of the RAR files are incomplete, force it to download anyway. If there are only the older PAR files available, download the .PAR file, and if any of the RAR files are incomplete, don’t download it at all.

In Xnews, by clicking on the author’s name you select that particular message. Don’t click on the subject itself, because then you will either read the post if its icon is a notepad, or open the thread if its icon is a folder or a stack of boxes, and at this time you don’t want to do either of those. Then use space and the cursor keys to put all messages you want on the queue (note the queue numbers in the Q column). Press space to queue an item, and press space again on the same item to un-queue it. Press shift-space to queue an item at the top of the list.

In Newsbin, select all the parts you want to download and press CTRL-E to put them in the download list (another tab). Press CTRL-D to remove them from the download list. You can also click on the box picture in front of the subject to do this. If you want to download an incomplete file, right-click, then choose Download Special/Download Incompletes. In the download list, you can rearrange the order in which it should download the files by selecting the files and dragging them elsewhere.

As I said, all parts are made by combining several segments, and all files are made by combining several RAR parts. In the end, that means that when you download a single file you’re actually downloading hundreds of separate smaller segments. So don’t let that surprise you :). In Xnews you can start downloading the attachments of the queued items to the download directory by pressing F4, and you can abort the downloading by pressing ESC. In Newsbin (as you might have noticed already) the downloading starts while you queue the files, and you can pause/resume the downloading by pressing the pause button in the toolbar. And then all you’ve got to do is wait until they’re all downloaded to your computer. In the meantime, I suggest you read the next chapter.

Some more on how to use Xnews. You can select the messages you are not interested in with shift while pressing the cursor keys, and then you can mark them as read with the [ key (and the other way around with the ] key). Press the U key to filter out all read messages, or type a search string in the box at the bottom, and press CTRL-F9 to clear all filters. Press F5 to get new headers. In Newsbin, type your search string in the search box at the top.

Btw, if any of these keyboard shortcuts sound confusing and you are more of a menu person that’s fine. All of these applications (Newsleecher as well) offer the option of right-clicking on the files to see a list of commands. You can right-click to download, to force download (in case they are incomplete or duplicate), mark as read, remove from download, etc, etc, etc. Also, take some time to view the menus in the toolbar as well as any icons to see what their function is. Icons in the toolbar that may not have a text name can usually be found out by hovering your mouse over them for a second or looking at the “view” menu to see if you can view those icons “with text”.

Unpacking and recovering

First of all, and this is quite important, ALWAYS, I repeat ALWAYS check if the files came in without errors. This is because usenet is quite unreliable, and aside from losing some segments it sometimes also destroys parts of segments. Over the years, newsgroups have gotten a lot better since today’s connections are more reliable contributing to higher quality content being uploaded, but even then you still get a lot of corrupted files. This checking can be done in three ways and is often done automatically, using the three tools I will describe next. The RAR files have their own crc-check built-in, it will never let you extract a file if the archive is damaged, so unRARing a file is a good way to check the file’s integrity. Second, there are the so-called PAR2/PAR and SFV files which are dedicated especially to that job… Anyways, more about those in a minute.

Well, let’s do the easy part first. After you’ve downloaded the RAR parts, you need WinRAR, the archiving program by RarLabs, to extract the actual file from them. But if I may say so, if you didn’t already have this installed on your computer, you should be ashamed of yourself! WinRAR can archive files to the (more efficient) RAR as well as the ZIP format, and can extract files from about any other type of archive, ranging from ACE and LZH to even ISO files. It is an amazing application. With WinRAR you can extract the files in the RAR archives you are downloading right now. This RAR archive is probably divided into multiple parts with extensions like .rar/.r00/.r01 or part01.rar/part03.rar/part03.rar. Just right-click on any of those parts and choose extract to… to extract them to a directory. You can also drag-n-drop with the right mouse button, etc (since if you double-click on/opened a .rar file, it opens in a window similar to windows explorer).

WinRAR comes with a 40-day trial and asks for you to buy it and the end of it. If you like the application, buy it, as it supports the developer promoting future releases of the great software! Of course, you can still continue using it indefinitely if you so choose (it will just have a nag screen every time you open it once the trial is over).

Now, about recovering missing or damaged files… If a file (.rar) is damaged or missing (parts), you can still recover it to its original state. The easiest way to do this is by using the PAR2 or PAR files, of which a couple usually are posted along with the RAR files. PAR2 files are (as you might already have guessed) the files with the extensions .par2/.vol00+01.par2/etc, and PAR files use .par/.p01/.p02/etc. The first of these, the .par2 or .par file, is a very small file which I recommend you download always, even before the RAR files if it’s available. With the .par2 or .par file and the tool QuickPAR you can check the set of files you just downloaded (or are downloading), and it will tell you if a file is ok, damaged or incomplete. If all files are ok, just proceed with what you were planning to do with them (unrar, copy, whatever). However, if one or more of the files are damaged or not downloaded at all, you will have to recover those. Note that PAR2 can also repair partially downloaded files, so if a file is incomplete, just download it anyway! PAR(1) can not, so in that case, it is pointless to download incomplete files. Thankfully, these days just about EVERYTHING comes with PAR2 files as PAR(1) files are outdated and useless (compares to). So Winrar and QuickPAR are all you need.

As for the repairing, when QuickPAR is done checking it tells you how many recovery blocks it has, and how many it still needs to repair the files. In the case of PAR2, every file with the .volYY+XX.par2 extension contains a couple of blocks, where XX is the number you need to look at. If you need 5 more blocks, you should download the +4.par2 and the +1.par2 file. In the case of PAR1, you need to download a whole .P??. file for each missing or damaged file. Note that you do not need to download all of the PAR2 or PAR files, as soon as you have enough of them they will be able to repair. When you have them, press the repair button, and when it’s done the missing parts will be on your hard disk. Great, huh? 😉

Basically though, if you are downloading something, it is best to download *all* par files associated with it. They are usually only about 15% of the file’s entire size and you delete them once you’re done with them anyways. So download, open the par file (make sure QuickPAR is installed) and let it scan the files and if they need repair, choose to repair or check “auto-repair” so that it always goes straight to work. Once repaired or confirmed repair is not needed, unrar the files. Then delete the pars, the .rar’s and keep only the files that were rar’d within them. You’re done!

Another quick note, Newsbin Pro offers a great feature that makes this easy. It will either come set by default or you might have to look into its settings, but it offers the feature of auto-unraring files (if they aren’t damaged) and deleting the rar files. This feature doesn’t work all the time but does have a high success rate. It doesn’t delete the par files so you will still have to delete those but hey…to download, unrar and delete the rar files…it saved you from most of the work. It doesn’t however auto-par so if the rar’s need to be PAR’d then you will have to do everything manually but that’s a small sacrifice.

There’s also the SFV files, which you can check with QuickSFV. An .SFV file is quite similar to the .PAR file, with it you can check if they are correct. However, they can’t do anything else than that, so they’re not really sophisticated. So they are only useful if the files didn’t come with any PARs. Past that, I personally usually skip downloading these or delete them if I have since most everything comes with PAR2. Also, you can edit SFV files in a text editor if you changed the filenames, which might in some cases come in handy.

Another way of recovering is to use the RAR recovery record. If a RAR file is complete, but damaged (either a crc error or missing a few hundreds of bytes), and you’re running out of PAR files, or don’t want to download those, then you can check if the RAR files have a so-called recovery record. You can do that by right-clicking on one of the RAR files and choosing the archive tab. If it tells you a recovery record is present, then lucky you, because there is another way to recover those files using RAR. Note that (quite similar to PAR2), you can not repair more damage than the size of the recovery record permits. In any case, the method to repair is to open WinRAR, select the damaged file, and click on Repair or press CTRL-R. If it is successful then you’re good to go, and all you have left to do is to rename the resulting file to the file which was damaged.

Last and also least, if all those options have failed, you can request a repost. Before you do that, check if the poster has posted a (00/x) message, or a .nfo or .txt file. If so, read it, because they often contain information about how and when to request reposts. In general, it is done like this. You either reply to one of the files in the post, or you send a new message with the subject “ATTN: – Please repost files for – read inside” to the newsgroup. In the message body, write which files you need, and then take a look at every individual part by clicking on the subject to see which segments exactly are missing (if they’re not too much), and also write those down. The poster can then choose to either repost entire files or only segments of them. Be nice, and you end your request with something like thanks, thanks in advance, or TIA (also thanks in advance). If the description of the files you want re-posted is rather short, then you can also put the entire message in the subject, like “ATTN: (…) – Please repost PAR files for (…) – TIA”.

Remember what I mentioned earlier about posting to newsgroups. Try to read the newsgroup’s FAQs of their website. You may find that you never have to post to newsgroups (it’s up to you). If you ever get the sudden urge to want to contribute or anything, you definitely want to visit their website, read ALL rules and FAQs and if there is a way…get to know some of their members so that they can get to know you a little. Everything in life involves politics, especially when you want to jump into someone else’s realm to take part in the activities.

Scan for Viruses!

When downloading ANYTHING from ANYWHERE, ALWAYS (heh) remember to scan for viruses. After unraring something, scan the contents before opening them. Now, when it comes to anime…you usually never run into this issue (doesn’t mean don’t scan though). The anime newsgroups are generally made up of hard-core fans who are there to do a good deed. However, if you apply this guide to anything else…you may want to be leery because you never know when someone might post something with something evil attached just because they get a kick out of driving other people mad. Since it’s not legal to track those people down, find their address, pay them a visit and beat the crap out of them…it’s best just to be pro-active in not letting things happen. If a file is infected with anything, delete immediately and empty your trash. Maybe there is another version of it you can download.

As for downloading things other than anime, you can pretty much use this guide for anything (changing a few variables around..such as what newsgroup you’re connecting to). I, however, won’t be detailing any of that or providing examples due to that’s another world of controversy and due to legal purposes. I’m sure you catch the drift 🙂

At this point in the tutorial, you have reached where you need to be to download all of the anime you want. Through a little practice you will find that this is all very easy and your actions will be broken down into the following steps:

  1. Load the headers of a newsgroup
  2. Select the files you want to download
  3. Par-check them and unrar the files.
  4. Delete the rar’s/par’s (clean up)
  5. Enjoy the file(s) you just downloaded.

Now when I said Newsbin Pro tries to take care of unraring and deleting the rar files…that reduces these steps even further.

So the hardest part of newsgroups is getting started. Obtaining the server you need to connect to, the application you want to use, and a general understanding of that application (and science of things). The rest becomes these few steps I just mentioned and now it’s just a reflex to download everything you need.

 

We have ONE MORE chapter to look at.

Finding, download and using .NZB files

This chapter is completely optional as it opens you to another approach to finding files within newsgroups. If you are familiar with torrents, this kind of matches the step-by-step process you use for them.

You can select files in newsgroups, and create a file (.NZB) that pretty much bookmarks their location and a list of all posts related to them. People usually post these files within their post (along with the rar files, par files, sfv files…etc). If you downloaded that one NZB file and sent it to anyone else, they would be able to open it in their newsreader application and it will automatically gather all of the posts for the files related into the window for download.

Now what makes this nice is that there are a number of search engines (again, just like torrents) where you can search for what you are looking for. They spider all of the newsgroups looking for the files that are posted and allow you to choose what you want and to download an NZB file for them. Most of them allow you to select multiple files and it will combine everything into one NZB file. You would then open that NZB file into your newsreader and all of the posts will be right there. Select them all and download! You’re done!

So you can either browse newsgroups directly (as highlighted in the tutorial), or search for specific items and download their NZB files to get straight to the point.

A list of a few example search engines:

 

While using newsgroups/usenet, if you start finding files that error while downloading with a message similar to “post does not exist”, it generally means the post has been deleted on the network. This is most likely due to a DMCA request. Any company based in the US or that has servers that contribute to their networks within the US, are subject to DMCA removal requests. These requests demand the removal of copyrighted content from such networks with the threat of action if they do not comply. Chances are low that you would run into this while acquiring “anime”, but when you start snooping into other categories such as movies/music/games (not that I am promoting this), you may find this to be a frequent experience. Do not fret as the error is nothing caused by you or a bug in your application. It’s just luck of the draw sometimes 🙂

This pretty much covers everything! So give it some practice and once you feel comfortable with everything, you are hear-by graduated. Have fun!

In future revisions, I may add some more screen-shots but I think the words are explanatory enough. Plus the websites for the applications mentioned here have FAQs, screenshots and tutorials if needed.

 

Update: 07-18-2013
Some wording has been slightly adjusted and retention information on examples updated from 800 to the current average of 1700+ days. Based on current results of quality tests between examples and other companies, examples have been kept the same.

Update: 10-12-2014
Fixed some spelling errors within the tutorial and cleaned up a few descriptions to make more sense for those with limited tech talk backgrounds. Also, added in a few new points.

Update: 04-07-2020
Updated some of the information about retention since the mentioned services offer more than 4,000 days now. Also cleaned up a lot of the grammar and modernized some of the statements. Fixed the link to WinRAR.

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Comments (4)

  1. Egoodell1

    Great info on usenet access. Very informative.

  2. JimmyJ

    been using Usenet for years. Great article that you put together. Biggest reasons for using it is the vast amount of files that you can find on Usenet + download speeds + 256 bit SSL encrypted connections. If you’re intimidated by everything, start with Easynews. They have a great web-interface that’s intuitive to use.

  3. nzbguy

    Nice article, wish I could come up with stuff like that for my webpage, hehe.

  4. […] that you are reading this tells us that you already get the general idea of newsgroups (if not, here is a tutorial someone […]

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