Looking for good USENET primer

I used to spend a lot of time on news:// protocol back in the 90s, but haven't touched it for good 20 years or so.

Could anyone point me to a good primer on how to use USENET for piracy? Looking for advice on client software, or webapps, good services worth paying the subscription that will give me access to all the right newsgroups and archives.

Last time I used news, all this stuff was free, so I'm at a bit of a loss on what's worth paying for.

Btw, I did try looking for answers before turning to Lemmy, but ended up with just a ton of SEO garbage articles designed to serve ads, waste time and provide no real answers :(

29 comments

I went with the yearly unlimited subscription through Frugal. I believe I paid $39.00 for the year, plus it comes with a 500gb block account through Blocknews.

A good indexer is critical to your setup. Since I just started my Usenet journey a month ago, I can only recommend two: NZBgeek and Drunkenslug. There are many others that I’m sure are worth it, I just haven’t had time to test anything else. NZBgeek might not have open registrations right now.

I use SABnzbd as my downloader.

Other than that, one of the best resources I used when getting set up was TRaSH Guides. Endless guides on configuring your downloader, indexers, and much more. Do some research on Sonarr, Radarr, and the other arr programs. Takes a little bit of effort getting it all set up, but makes everything so easy once you’re done.

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- Thanks! At this point I don't yet know what an indexer is, so I guess I have much to learn!
  
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  An indexer indexes nzb files. Nzb files are like torrent files, they point you to the files you want. So the indexer says "takes this ABC.nzb file and you'll get couch the latest Ubuntu iso cough".
  
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I can’t recommend an all-in-one primer, but if you want to look up guides independently, you’ll probably be most interested in these tools/services:

a Usenet host (paid. they’re largely the same. Look for deals)

a Usenet indexer site (analogous to a Pirate Bay type search engine). I like nzbgeek but there are hundreds. Many require a small annual fee and this may be worth it to you, but you can use free ones to test your initial setup.

A Usenet indexer is going to let you download .nzb files, which is analogous to downloading .torrent files from a torrent indexer. The nzb describes what posts in what newsgroups contain the files for a particular release.

SABnzbd (download client, analogous to a torrent client like Transmission)

browser plugins to simplify clicking an nzb download link and sending it to SABnzbd (not always needed if you’re running everything on your local machine, but important if your SAB instance runs on another server or in a Docker container)

If you’re looking to set up some extra infrastructure for automating a lot of steps, there’s also web apps to cover a ton of video use cases, like:

Sonarr and Radarr (for monitoring specific tv shows and movies and automatically searching for nzbs, downloading them, and moving them to a final home on disk)

Plex or Jellyfin (for providing a Netflix-like UI you can use to look for something to watch and then stream it to your browser/phone/TV)

Overseerr (for a single interface to look for shows and movies and have them automatically added to Sonarr/Radarr.

I’d highly recommend setting up Docker and putting all of these apps into separate containers. Linuxserver creates easy to setup and update Docker packages for all these things. It’s also a great resource for finding other web apps you didn’t know you needed.
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- This is everything you need to know to get going, OP.
  
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- Mine are Easyhost at a deal, sabnzbd and the *arrs
  As indexers I only use the free tiers.
  
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- This feels like something that could be understood easily, thanks 👍. Can I ask ,what if want to not search and add shows based on new items but, I just want to get , say like a movie from 90s , what use is then radarr and sonarr?
  
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  Sonarr and Radarr are there for managing your requests, so they’ll handle things like downloading it when it’s available (either because it’s a new release or because the torrent/nzb weren’t readily available at the time you added it), upgrading an existing file to a higher quality version if it becomes available, sourcing a new copy if you mark the one it found as bad (e.g. huge, hard-coded Korean subtitles ruining your movie).
  
  If you’re trying to find new stuff based on vague conditions (like “90s action movie), I don’t think any of the self hosted apps are a huge help. You’re probably better off sourcing ideas from an external site like IMDb or tvdb (maybe even Rotten Tomatoes?). Those sites maintain their own rich indexes of content and tags, whereas the self hosted stuff seems to be built more around the “I’ll make an api request once I know what you’re looking for”, which sucks when you don’t really know what you’re looking for.
  
  I think there are even browser extensions for IMDb that will add a button to the IMDb movie page letting you automatically add it to Radarr if you like the look of it.
  
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  Radarr is to keep it organized so programs like Jellyfin can understand it and I can watch it instead of digging in directories.
  
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I use newsdemon as my primary provider with a few block accounts as backups.

I would personally recommend sabnzbd as the downloader paired with sonarr and radarr to handle searching for TV and movies specifically. These are all web apps but they can be run on Windows but also could be running on something as simple as the raspberry pi and then remotely accessed from another computer in your network.

You will also need a indexer, popular recommend ones are nzbgeek or dognzb. Most of these charge either a yearly or a lifetime sub fee but take that with a grain of salt, they often take it away.

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I highly recommend https://usenet.farm/ Good pricing and I've never had a single issue with them.

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Paid services have consolidated to a great degree. But I’ve been a long time Easynews subscriber.

They have decent retention, good completion, and are johnny-on-the-spot re. DMCA requests.

Their real claim to fame is an easy to use browser based front end, so no third party client hassles and it works on mobile.

That said, MUCH has changed since the 90s, i.e. encrypted posts, the USENET hierarchy is largely broken and good luck finding any current text discussion (looking at you, Adobe, ya skeevy fucks).

Should you want more, this is a good guide. https://www.cogipas.com/how-to-use-usenet/

GL&HF

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- Is Usenet always that expensive? Their recommended plan is $30 per month with a discount for the first three months. And the cheapest one is $10/month but that only gets you 20GB...
  
  I'm not really a pirate so I don't know much about paid pirating services. But I'm pretty sure I could get Netflix and Disney+ for that kind of money. Is Usenet access really worth that much?
  
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  So you could get 2 streaming services which would make you miss out on the content available on the other 200+ other streaming services out there.
  
  With Usenet you can get content from all of them.
  
  Eweka is cheaper https://www.eweka.nl/en/landing/unlimited-usenet-special € 5,99/mo for a year
  
  And here's a deal for easynews. https://signup.easynews.com/checkout/unlimited-special-deal/ $6 a month for a year
  
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  I pay $15/mo and w/ rollover gigs always have plenty. If you’re looking for obscure or D/C’d content, it’s damn well worth it.
  
  Was able to score a Nordic comedy series for a co-worker that couldn’t be found elsewhere.
  
  Also, content you sideload from USENET doesn’t disappear at the whim of a corporation, or due to licensing shenanigans. Just sayin’.
  
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  Black Friday deals bring discounts, as low as 45$ per year for some providers
  
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My current set up is Eweka (usenet provider) and nzbgeek (indexer). I then run docker containers; nzbget (downloader), radarr, sonarr & lidarr (films, TV and music). I watched a few YouTube videos on how to set them up and have been very satisfied.

All the downloads automatically move to my NAS, and my jellyfin/Plex servers are pointed at them. The great thing about the "arrs" is that (if set up correctly) they rename and organise your media in a way that makes them easily identified by Plex/jellyfin, so all you have to do is say, I want movie "x" and then 20 minutes later you can watch it via Plex/jellyfin.

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i think most others covered it but for provider Frugal usenet is probably best bang for your buck as you get access to two separate systems.

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Primer:

Usenet is for text, not for piracy. Just because you can share giant files over NNTP, that does not mean that you should. I mean, the IRC supports "file sharing" too, but there are much better protocols for that.

The main hurdle trying to abuse NNTP for piracy is to find a Usenet provider that actually mirrors binaries. I am not aware of any free one, as it takes very much traffic and disk space.
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- Is it the same uuencode as ages ago?
  
  Anywho, I know nntp was not designed for file sharing, but USENET supposedly hosts some more obscure content, often impossible to find on torrents.
  
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