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Guides and articles
Guides and articles
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Group Lists, Newsgroups & Headers
The number of binary groups your provider carries depends on the quality of your provider, but the list is usually over 100,000 groups. Here we will take a look at how to get a group list from your News Server, add groups to your list and download Headers from them.
What exactly are Newsgroups?
When you have a news server, you can download a list of Newsgroups that are carried on the server using your Newsreader software. Newsgroups generally tend to have their own topics so posters stick to the topics. Obviously spam can be a problem and since most News Server providers don't / can't monitor and keep the groups clean, sometimes adult or objection al content can appear in an unrelated group. This is just something you have to be vigilant about really. Newsgroups generally stay on topic.- alt.binaries.multimedia
- alt.binaries.multimedia.24
- alt.binaries.multimedia.3-stooges
- alt.binaries.multimedia.alias
- alt.binaries.multimedia.andromeda
- alt.binaries.multimedia.anime
- alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.d
- alt.binaries.multimedia.anime.highspeed
Above is an example of how newsgroups are organized. The first one, "alt.binaries.multimedia" is one of the busiest binary Newsgroups known. Inside the group are literally millions of text posts that make up larger files (that generally make up even larger files, as we'll see later). Luckily, Newsreader software like Newsbin Pro has made browsing through headers from binary groups simple, with a double-click approach to downloading files.
There are groups for music, movies, games, software etc. Navigating through these groups and finding the stuff you want is not that easy, especially since groups like alt.binaries.multimedia could have millions of headers to download (which is quite large in size) - we will see later that the creation of NZB files has made file-sharing via Newsgroups so much easier.
Binary groups generally begin with "alt.binaries" - there are plenty that don't but all the main groups do. Posting of binary files to text groups is quite simply not allowed and can be automatically filtered by a News Server.
A Group List
 Go back to the main interface of Newsbin Pro. Select the groups tab on the left of the application. You list for now should be empty. Right click inside this box and select Add Group. Alternatively you can find Add Group under the Groups drop-down menu.
Updating Group List
 You will find that there is already a list of groups provided by Newsbin Pro. These are some of the most popular and busy groups on Usenet, but depending on the quality of your provider, they may be far from the amount of groups available to you.
Take note of "Group Name Filters", Pictures is often selected by default. This would filter out only Picture groups, which are as they sound, binary groups that are used to post solely images. You can unselect this and the entire default list will be available.
In this list are some of the giants of Usenet, such as alt.binaries.multimedia. However, if you want to see all the groups available to you, click "Update Groups From Server" but be warned, this may take quite a while. You will actually see the download in the background and when it is finished the group list should automatically refresh, if it doesn't, click Refresh List.
Most premium Usenet providers carry many thousands of Newsgroups, some are binary, most are text groups.
Add/Subscribe to a group
 To add any of these groups to your list on Newsbin Pro, simply double click them here and you will see the tick box will be selected. You can select as many groups as you want. When you mare done, click OK.
Downloading Headers
 The group now appears in your list in Newsbin Pro. However, to find what files or text posts that exist in this group, you have to download headers. Some groups have millions of headers and when the figure of headers is that high, it can be hundreds of megabytes to download all the headers for the group. For this reason, if you right click on the group, you will see there is a "Download Special" option.
What this does is it gives you a quick,. predetermined number of headers to download. The headers you get will be the latest available (or, if you already have downloaded headers for a group, they will be those of posts made right before the oldest in your headers). To get an idea of what a binary group looks like, click Download 5,000 Older Posts. You will notice that your Download list will now have 1 item in it. This item is the headers being downloaded from the server. For 5,000 posts, it should finish pretty fast.
Once you have downloaded the headers, right click on the group again in the list and click Show All Posts.
View inside a group
 You will now the see the available text or binary posts to get.One thing to take note of is "Compact View". With this feature enabled, groups of files will only show up as one item on the list, so unselect that now to avoid confusion (if it is already selected.
The group will definitely look messy and very ugly the first time you peer into it. Don't worry about this. Scroll across the group using the slider and click "Date" a few times until you can see that the most recent files are showing up at the top and the oldest at the bottom. This is the easiest way to view a group.
Pay attention to file sizes. Obviously, text posts in the binary groups are MUCH smaller than their binary counterparts.
Now, you know how to update your Group list and add groups to your list. You can also download headers easily by right clicking on the group and selecting an option you want, but be careful, downloading all headers can be many millions in some cases. Now it's time to look at reading text posts and downloading binary files.
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Created: 30 July 2007 Last updated: 4 February 2008
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