V550-More-NZB

From Newsbin

How NZB files came to be

The traditional process of downloading headers from a group, and then selecting items from that group suffers from a number of drawbacks:

• It can be very time and effort intensive to look through the headers downloaded, especially in large groups that can get millions of new headers every day. Specialist downloading programs such as Newsbin try and help by consolidating all the headers that belong to a single post (file) into a single line in the Post lists, but this can still leave a lot of entries to examine for items of interest.

• Downloading headers can consume a lot of bandwidth. This is of particular concern to those who have slow links, or are capped in the amount they are allowed to download from their news servers.
• Very often the subjects used in the headers are cryptic and it can be difficult to work out what a post really refers to.
• The items that of interest to you may be available, but not in the groups you have decided to examine so you do not find them.

To address this issue the concept of Usenet Indexing sites developed. They basically act by:

• Downloading headers into their own databases. Exactly which groups are covered can vary by the indexing sites, but the larger commercial ones cover all the non-trivial binary groups

• Amalgamating similar headers in a similar way that Newsbin does with headers to give a single entry representing all the related underlying headers.
• Use both automated and manual methods to attach meaningful search terms to entries irrespective of what the subject lines say. This allows items with crytpic subjects to be found more easily.
• Providing powerful and fast search facilities to their users.
• Making the search facilities work independently of groups so that users can find the items whatever group they were posted to on Usenet.
• Provide facilities for downloading the results of searches in a format that the binary News Readers can use directly as an alternative to downloading headers.

Initially there were various proprietary formats for downloading the results of searches on the indexing sites. Very quickly it was realized that to get the maximum benefit and to get most binary downloaders to be able to use search results a standardized format was required. This NZB file format has become the standard format used by NZB indexing sites and most of the major binary downloading programs now support this. Newsbin 5 in particular has very powerful support for using NZB files.

NZB files contain all the information necessary for NewsBin to download files from Usenet. They can therefore be used as an alternative to downloading headers to get the details of particular posts. There are a number of sources for NZB files, both from free and pay sites.

There are also a wide variety of free sites that provide NZB files - typically covering specific topic areas. These tend to come and go, so a search via Google using a term like NZB Sites is probably the best way to find such sites.

Note that does not mean there is not still a reason for downloading headers. It is possible that you have some specialist interests and the groups that cater to these interests are not covered by the Indexing site(s) you use. Sometimes the search terms the indexing sites uses are not perfect and a manual examination of the headers allows you to find items you might have missed using the indexing site. However, the convenience factor of indexing sites and the associated NZB files are such that many Usenet users no longer bother to download headers.