What Usenet clients can you recommend

I tried grabit long ago. It was easy, and free.
I then went to Newsleecher, which had a lot of option to grab binaries automatically, but it required a subscription (there were hacked version, but I paid officially to the dev because I thought it was worth the price to maintain it ). It's now free, as long as you don't need to use the "automatic search and download" feature.
but it's kind of broken now if you are looking for TV series, all series got DMCA'd so they are not not posted using their real names, making automatic search useless.

There are other apps, but I never used them (SabNZB, CouchPotatoes, radarr, sonarr, specialized in tv series or movies)


I recommend you try Newsleecher, it's free, not hard to use and has a lot of options.
no harm trying. if you don't like you can try another one.

Just to hijack this a little, what's a good place to find NZB files?

Edit: shit, I probably can't ask about that here, sorry

yeah, not the best place to ask where to find nzb
it's like asking for torrent files.


There are few websites for newsgroup search (maybe we can share these, it only lists posted messages) and newsgroup indexers (can't share these, it sort and reference files by categories and provide nzb). if you are geek enough, you can find a 15 day free good indexer. (hinting, like all people do in 3DS section...)
If you want, there's a search engine included in newsleecher.

@cyan there was one recomended to me but i cant get it to work it has a search feature i mainly wana get my hands on some big blue box stuff

I don't know how old is the file you want, but doing a search for "bigbluebox" in newsleecher search engine, the last posted file is from 100 days ago.
maybe new posts have a different release name (bbb ?)

not all files are posted on newsgroup too, and sometime they are not named in an obvious way to prevent deletion/DMCA.
you might want to search for the "release file name" too (usually found in the .nfo file)


your client can list groups correctly? (just to know if you correctly setup the login/pass/group subscription/etc.)
did you try to download anything yet? (random, just to know it works)

bigbluebox releases are usually in :
alt.binaries. (a.b. for short)
a.b.games
a.b.games.nintendo3ds
a.b.games.wii
a.b.consoles.ps3
a.b.consoles.xbox360

Grabit.
Still use it to this day and it works perfectly.

For the more rarer stuff, I got access to private torrent networks and private FTP.

I have mainly tried grabit, sabnzbd and altbinz. Never gone in for rss or services like sickbeard, mainly as I never have any hard drive space and that can be a quick way to run out.

Grabit. Nice and simple but lacks some functionality I like -- when I used it there was not a pause button for individual files, instead I made a null server and moved things to that to pause. One of the few things to still have group header downloading and viewing.
Altbinz. Loved it but have not used it in a while.
sabnzbd is what I use to this day, and works wonderfully on linux. Being controlled in the browser has its drawbacks (altbinz being a windows program is instant, browser is still perfectly functional but I can't move as fast as I usually do) but ultimately allows fine grain control over your downloads.

Whatever you do absolutely make sure you have a standalone par2 program. http://www.quickpar.org.uk/ is the standard for windows. Pypar2 for Linux. You may occasionally have to put the right files in the right place, or rename something and manually run the par2 recovery but it becomes a mechanical thing after a while.
If you want a usenet post decoder there are some small ones (forgot the one I used to use but it came in handy once or twice).
I assume you know how to computer but to state the obvious do do do have a proper big boy RAR, 7z and whatever handling program. 7zip is free and does wonders here. If your automated download program messes up and only extracts the separate sub files, or generally errors out (all I have used have their little hissy fits) being able to right click and sort it wherever it may be is no bad thing.

As for places to go it got hard a few years back. Best advice I can say is we all likely have closely guarded lists of choice search terms for online auction sites. Do the same here.
Some hints though
Some sites tell you archive content -- it may be [4589a7549874009ef] "4589a7549874009ef.rar" yenc as the subject name but if you click on the collection button and it says the name of the latest and greatest tv show or film you were after.
In general searches you might be able to set a min or max size value. Use this to filter the cruft.
There are many posters that return time and time again, most fake posters don't go all the way either and will not replicate the full info (you can also download the first rar in the set and see if it is archived or contains another rar or something too, and given most rars are some 50 megs or more like 20 if you grab the end rar file you can even justify a bit of exploratory downloading -- before moving back to ADSL I had 8 megs a second, probably took longer for the auto sweeper to pick it up).
Many NZB sites will allow you to search the NFO. They might scrub the name but the nice unique IMDB URL is often still there.
The older tricks (reversed names, obfuscated/leetspeak names, simply searching for s05e03 when last night was the release of s05e03 for that show and no other according to http://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/ or something) aren't doing so well any more.
Book viruses. Have not done it for a while but occasionally you would get books but actually download exes. The thing was though several of those exes actually contained the books you wanted. 7zip rather nicely extracts executable files and often turned a little virus into a perfectly serviceable epub. Make sure you don't run the exe and if your AV is that paranoid then kick it in the head for the duration but it can be done.

Go to some of those premade nzb sites and reverse your way back up -- you can always find the poster, possibly some article numbers, group and such. From there you have your poster.
Similar story for the paid sites. I played on one the other day and hovering over the download button (which you got to pay for) popped up a nice number I stuck in a general search engine and bam, nice nzb from one of the crazy groups that you would never know.

Final trick. You can sit there hoping to grab something in the first few hours before it gets taken down (being a filthy European type everything you want to see airs at night in the US, nobody is at work then so you then have 12-15 hours in which to get it before they come into work the next day and set about issuing notices to astraweb and giganews and what have you), however waiting works well (TV shows care, DVD releases less so, other languages can work too) and the third option of pick something likely to entertain you rather than specifics -- the copyright peeps might be taking down the latest and greatest but their nice stuff from 2006 they probably don't care about, such things still play just fine and take up a couple of hours very happily, not to mention if someone bothered to post it then it is probably half decent.

newsleecher automatically filter rar in rar, or passworded rars.
it also has an automatic par2 file handling (downloading only the needed amount of bloc and correcting/renaming the file set for you)
it also has auto extract (though, I didn't like to use it as I wouldn't like random shit being extracted without my supervision, like exe or viruses), and has a bug in trying to decompress and move non rar files (probably a bug to fix by the developer). hopefully I disabled the "auto delete rar after decompression".

but lately, auto extract became useful for what I'm doing and the way I'm using newsgroup now.
grabbing the nzb from indexer's site, and setting "auto extract" into a sub-folder named after the nzb filename let me know what the 0255427dd0a24bbc8dab1c0d87b837d8.mkv actually is without watching the video.

for tv shows, newsleecher was the best for the past years. it had auto-search and download based on filters and folder management.
the shows being deleted after 12-24h wasn't a problem thanks to automatic download right after the file was posted. But copyright owners are a lot more aggressive this year (since September 2017), file didn't even had the time to spread over all newsgroup server anymore that the file was already deleted.
So like Fast said, you can't search for s05e03 or tv show title anymore, all new (popular) shows are released using obfuscated name.
random string as filename, random string inside the rar, random string in the par2 repair (it will not fix the filename for you), and each posted file from a set are sometime scattered around multiple groups to prevent DMCA'ing all the set at once, making copyright owner's life harder and taking longer to get the file deleted.

sometime, old posters are still there filling requests, but people gone mad and not happy getting requests without proper thanks. it's like here, people thinking they deserve help and hacks from devs, and devs rage quitting the scene.
if you want something on newsgroup (well if targeted with copyright companies), you'll need to find an indexer website where posters are actually referencing all these obfuscated posts.
if you look for tv shows, read last txt posts in a.b.teevee (since September 2017) to get a lot of help on how it works now.


but, I guess you look more for games (asking for BBB). I don't know if they are obfuscated too and if they do how much they are.

@cyan its ther on usenet.tk

sabnzbd theoretically has that as well but occasionally gets tripped up by subs coming with an idx and rar file, and occasionally there are actually good rar in rar files (might have been a way to keep scene rars but dodge automated crc checks or something on the hosts).

Equally some of the passworded stuff can be used, it is not like the 360 days though where there was a nice site you could get them from.

Other auto handling can be troubled by rar.001 rar.002... type arrangements that some posters use (plain .rar .r01 .r02... is fine).

Likewise I have had trouble with auto par stuff. Runs the base check, renames some stuff, tries to generate replacements, forgets where it is and then stops where the general par2 program sorts it happily.

I used Newsleecher and found it pretty good. There may be better options though, I didn't look too much into it.

I can't get the newsleecher search engine to show up bigblue box stuff

I always used NZB sites then opened the NZB file in Newsleecher.

tunip, did you set enough days in the search range? When I searched "bigbluebox" string, the last I found was from 100 days ago.
also, are you sure it's posted and using the filename you are searching, or you don't know the release filename?

I can try to search too, if you want, but there's no reason I would find it and you don't.
maybe it's not named the way you wrote it (maybe it's a code or GameID, or release filename, not the full title of the game).

I found what I was looking for but now the download won't start

alt.binz has been my go to for years after i was tired of newsleecher bugging out on me.

alt.binz is free and is very reliable. as far as indexers most of them have closed registration or a pay to join thing

luckily i have a nice source and it works great. outside of that, just normal BINs to be SEARCHed, if you pick up that (dot).. INFO that is.

are there any free usenet servers

@tunip3 There are some, but they're heavily limited (limited to only a few GBs per month)

yeah thats fine @The Real Jdbye i dont mind i only need to download 500mbs of data

I know only just4today
it's free, but has a very very short retention time (files older than 1 week are not available)
the login/password works "just for today".

I don't know which cluster they are based of (biggest server, like astra, usenetserver or giganews). I don't know if things are deleted faster or slower than other servers, nor how fast they are propagated.