@Winnow

[Bagar-]

My favorite torrent site was recently killed, and I saw that Giganews thread and decided to give it a shot.

So I signed up and got a free trial thing. And i have not a fucking clue what to do with it.

Your assistance would be greatly appreciated. Pretend I'm completely retarded (I am) and tell me how to set this up, and exactly what it can do (I'm hoping it can download certain media that I would otherwise get from torrents.)

[Tyek]

Did you get the newsleecher? or just giganews?

[Bubba Grizz]

Epornium.com

[miir]

1) Subscribe to a usenet service like Giganews
2) Find or subscribe to a search provider like Supersearch or any number of NZB sites out there
3) Purchase Newsleecher, an eyepach, a hat and a shoulder parrot
4) Yarrr, now you be a proper pirate

[Xatrei]

High-retention usenet services like giganews have far too much information to be useful without using some sort of search tool that can access an index of articles that are not cached locally on your system. Giganews is up over 600 days of retention now. Indexing just a few of the heavily used groups will eat up tons of storage and bandwidth. Newsleecher is by far the best "all-in-one" solution. Get it, and you should be in business. It has its own search tool built in called supersearch. Once you've installed the full version and set some configuration options, it's pretty simple to use. Just search for what you want, narrow your search parameters if necessary, select the files you need to download, and a few minutes later they'll be conveniently downloaded and extracted to your hard drive.

If you don't go with newsleecher, you'll need to use an indexing service like http://binsearch.info to find files, and create a .nzb file. Use a .nzb grabber to download the files in the .nzb, and then use other tools to repair and extract your downloads (.par2 error correction and .rar compression typically). Each of these separate steps require a lot more manual involvement than newsleecher, which is for the most part a fire and forget solution.

Even with newsleecher, you may rarely encounter a gap in supersearch's indexes. Sometimes you can use a site like binsearch to get an .nzb file of what you want and then grab it with newsleecher, so keep that in mind if you run into the occasional hole in supersearch's memory. I've found myself in this sort of situation maybe once or twice in the last year, so NL is still soooo worth the extra cash for its convenience.

[Winnow]

It's old, but I created a tutorial for newsleecher/giganews a long time ago. Most of it still applies although it's more awesomer now.

http://www.veeshanvault.org/forums/view ... 25&t=18565

It's a flash tutorial..pretty crappy (first attempt at Captive or the other presentation app)

[Bagar-]

So I need Giganews AND Newsleecher?

[Xatrei]

Yes, giganews is the usenet provider. Newsleecher is client software to use usenet (giganews or any other provider you like).

Like I said in my post, you can get by without newsleecher if you're willing to spend more time & use a variety of different tools to do it. NL is nice because it's an all-in-one tool. If you're not sure that you'll like using usenet with newsleecher, I believe that newsleecher still has a monthly subscription option for a couple bucks a month instead of purchasing it outright. If you're going to use it for a prolonged period of time, it makes more sense to buy it, though. I tried it out w/ the subscription for a month or two and then bought it after I was hooked