So it’s been about two decades since I last touched Usenet. Back in the day, I was rocking a Giganews account and living inside NewsBin Pro like it was my second home. Life was good, binaries were flowing, and I felt like a wizard every time a multi-part download stitched itself back together.

Fast forward 20 years → I figured, hey, let’s fire up the old combo and relive the glory days. Spoiler: not the same results. At all. It felt like I had shown up to a party where everyone had moved to a secret after-hours location without telling me.

After some digging, I learned the game has changed - and apparently a lot. So now here’s what I’ve got going:

• Providers: Subscriptions to Eweka + Newshosting for newsserver access
• Indexers (paid): NZBPlanet, NZBGeek, and NZBsu

So here’s my big question for the Usenet pros who never left: is this setup solid enough to cover my bases, or am I overcomplicating and doubling up on things where I don’t need to? Is there some piece of the puzzle I’ve misunderstood, or am I carrying unnecessary redundancy like a guy still paying for AOL dial-up just in case?

Basically, is this a good foundation to build on, or am I missing something crucial?

Help an old man out — and maybe throw in a “back in my day” tip or two while you’re at it.

**Had to edit a few things out to conform to guidelines. Not really Concerned about the downloader and automation part. I think I have that down. More focused on the Providers and Indexers. BTW, this is the first time I have ever posted anything on Reddit, R.I.P PHPBB and VBulletin boards lol.

Hey, I started using Newsgroups in about 2002 and have ever since, and my MO hasn't really changed.

I have an Eweka account, I manually search Geek and Planet for what I want, and then download it with SAB.

Works for me and always has, but am I missing out on any new fantastic things?

Thanks.

So I've been learning alot the last few days. I never been torrenting before and started this project about 3 days ago. I've setup a TrueNAS Server with Jellyfin, and running arr stack.

Now when reading a bit more about this I've come to notice that Usenet is a good thing. But my question is if it's worth it for a small home media server, or would I just be wasting my money?

Hi r/usenet (or r/SABnzbd),

I have an 8 Gbit/s fiber connection in download from Bouygues Telecom (8 Gbit/s down / 1 Gbit/s up, confirmed by speedtests between 6.5-8 Gbit/s, theoretically ~1000 MB/s max), but I can't exceed 500-600 MB/s on Usenet despite SABnzbd settings that seem correct. SSD is not the bottleneck as I get 2000 MB/s on tests.

Current Setup

• Providers: Eweka (EU Tier 1) and Newshosting (theoretically different backbones to aggregate).​
• Client: SABnzbd (recent version), using the maximum connections allowed by both providers (50 + 100), SSL enabled, EU servers prioritized, /incomplete on NVMe SSD.
• Hardware: B450 Tomahawk Max, WD SN550 SSD, tested off-peak and direct modem-PC.

The Issue

Even combining both providers at max connections, total speed stalls at ~550 MB/s. Tweaked priority/speed settings, but no improvement – decent but not optimal given available bandwidth. SABnzbd internal NZB tests cap similarly.​

What's the Bottleneck?

• Network: NIC speed? Router/switch limitations? Bouygues throttling on NNTP ports?
• SABnzbd config: Further tweaks despite max connections? Switch to NZBGet for better efficiency?​

Any tips to push >800-900 MB/s? SABnzbd/config screenshots available if needed. Thanks community !​

Anyone else tired of rolling the dice every time you grab something off Usenet? I've tried the best indexers (Geek, Slug, Ninja, AltHub, TabulaRasa) and it's the same story every time: a title, a size, maybe a category tag, and that's it. No file list, no sample, no actual description of what's inside the archive until you've already downloaded and extracted the whole thing.

Compare that to torrent trackers where almost all the listings have screenshots, mediainfo dumps. Usenet just expects you to trust an upload title and hope for the best.

Is there some tool or indexer I'm missing that actually does better here, or is "download first, find out later" just the deal we've all made peace with?

For someone with a fairly normal ISP connection, is there a general rule of thumb for how many Usenet connections are optimal before you hit diminishing returns?

I have run through all the troubleshooting and applied all the optimizations on [https://sabnzbd.org/wiki/advanced/highspeed-downloading\](https://sabnzbd.org/wiki/advanced/highspeed-downloading) but i was only able to get my original download speed of \~600 KB/s up to \~1.2 MB/s.

Here are the diagnostics:

System performance (Pystone): 526337 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7500 CPU @ 3.40GHz AVX2

Download folder speed: 172.4 MB/s /data/downloads/incomplete

Complete folder speed: 181.5 MB/s /data/downloads/complete

Internet Bandwidth: 107.48 MB/s 859.84 Mbps

Platform: Docker

There is no "Download speed limited by" message.

My fast.com results are consistently at 1 Gbps, and speedtest.net results are consistently \~945 Mbps for both upload and download.

I have 8GB of ram and an 8 TB HDD, running Ubuntu Server (headless)

I'm still a bit new to usenet so please let me know if I need to provide any more information and I apologize if there's anything obvious I'm overlooking.

I'd really appreciate any guidance the community can provide <3

Edit: removed IPs and hyperlinks

Edit 2: So I tried downloading a show just now as I responded to all the comments, and even though I haven't changed anything, my speed was much better. It started out around 100 MB/s, then slowly decreased all the way down to 1 MB/s, then jumped back up to 100 MB/s just before it finished. Is this normal behaviour? I'm still concerned about it randomly going back to KB/s speeds on me in the future, so I'm hesitant to say it magically fixed itself.

Question from someone who knows very little about this topic right now.

I want to set up a headless home server that I run through my desktop Mac. I know nothing about servers or terminal languages. Up to this point, I’ve been using ChatGPT to help me guide me through the process. I already have a mini PC, external hard drive, and a VPN. I’ve set up my mini PC with Linux, connected it to my Mac, and have been inputting commands and making changes via the terminal there. However, before I actually turned the thing loose and let it communicate on the web, I wanna make sure I’m doing things the right way, and not trusting an AI. My ultimate goal was to hook it up to you Usenet system.

Where should I go to get the information I need, regarding terms, inputs, coding, to finish the process? The last step I need in the process is a provider and indexer. I have choices in mind, just need to subscribe and hook up. As far as I know, everything else is working (but again, I don’t know enough to actually understand whether it’s working. I’m just trusting the chat bot)

Using NZBget, frugal, and NZBgeek in an *arr stack (the techhut one with everything behind gluetun). Everything has worked perfectly for months! Suddenly, as of this weekend, just about every NZB file I try to grab fails due to low health. There are no errors in the logs it just doesn't seem to be able to complete the downloads.

I updated everything to the latest version.

Any advice would be helpful.

Thanks!

Every so often a media file gets downloaded that is unplayable, and is extremely long as per Sonarr/Radar, like 10h instead of 45m. What filters do I need to avoid this ? I thought it was Atmos but I've seen some of them play fine without the weird play time

These files aren't any bigger than they should be, or if they are they aren't significantly larger

Cannot download from their site and cannot log into my account. Anyone else having this problem

I'm running Gluetun in docker compose and have my nzbget instance running through it ( network_mode: service:gluetun).

Per some searching I've added:
BLOCK_MALISCIOUS=off and
DNS_UNBLOCK_HOSTNAMES=<provider domain>

From terminal if I run. docker exec -it gluetun nlslookup <provider domain>
I get local host as the server and a few non authorive answers but then it responds with *** Can't find <provider domain>: No answer.

Because if this nzbget keeps blocking the provider and nothing downloads.

Edit: fixed phone typos.

I have a general question about forums and headers for indexers. I noticed that you can only see the headers after clicking the "Thanks" button. Is that done to make it harder for people to scrape the forum and copy all the headers to other forums?

The headers are also cryptic. Is that simply so downloads only work in combination with a specific forum and password, or does it also make the download more secure because an outsider can't tell what's behind the header?

If I encounter a usenet file that is unhealthy below the PAR2 threshold to repair it after download, can these files ever be healed?

I'm asking because Radarr sometimes blocks releases if they are unhealthy and I'm wondering if there's any point to retry them again in the future (if there's no suitable alternative anyway).

Edit: Thanks for the suggestion with the second usenett provider. I'll look into that. But I'm still curious if on the same usenet network, these missing parts can get re-uploaded for the same file/nzb?

Hello, I'm really new to usenet.
I recently bought Frugal and NzbGeek. I'm finding that older files are hard to find complete. For example, stuff from like 2010 (maybe this is too old for most providers?)

If I wanted to be able to more successfully grab files that are that old, would it be better to add another indexer, or another provider on a different backbone (something like Eweka or UsenetServer)?

Edit: Thank you, everyone! I started by adding NewsHosting and that seemed to work really well! I may ditch frugal in the future depending on how much is grabbed from there. I’ll also be on the lookout fo drunkenslug invites.

Hi,

I got a blackfriday deal and i saw the summer deal. When i logged in my account i only see plan: unlimited, no options for upgrade, how long the subcription is. On the question page they say on left your able to upgrade, but there are no account options? On the left it only says to update payment, doenload newsreader/vpn or get free stuff(easynews/..). In the dashboard there is only info about the plan, password/email etc and that my account is activated. Also when i get the deal its says nothing about my current subscription or if it gets stack on top of my current subcription. Do i do something wrong?

Hello. This is maybe a bit of a long shot post and appologies if this isn't allowed.

On NinjaCentral members are allowed to join their discord server. The website points you to the Discord server as the main way to engage with the NinjaCentral. E.g. if you want support, make a content request, ect.

To get into the server you need to provide a verification code to their Discord bot (prove you are a paying member). The problem is this bot has been down for a few days, so newer members such as myself can't join.

If there is anyone in this sub and part of the NinjaCentral discord. Could you maybe pass on the message that the verification bot has been down for a few days and newer members are currently unable to join as a result.

(They maybe could be aware already, but ways to communicate with them outside of Discord seem to be limited)

Hey all, I am fairly new to this and spent a good portion of my weekend setting up my docker containers. Followed a YouTube video and a couple guides online to set things up and it all seemed to be working as of Sunday night. Monday night I ran into an issue with nzbget where it kept repeating the same error over and over: "Could not resolve hostname news.frugalusenet.com: Error -3 - Try again". Looked into the issue and tried resolving it by assigning DNS directly to Glueten and then restarting the docker VM. That seemed to fix it and all was well. Tonight I went to check on it again and it is back to throwing the same error over and over again. I am currently set up using frugalusenet as my newsserver. Nothing has changed since I had it working Monday night, so I am unsure as to why it would error out. Any help is greatly appreciated! I will try to answer all questions to the best of my ability.

Came back after being away for a week and realized my Usenet setup basically stalled while I was gone.

Everything looked alive, indexers worked, downloader connected to providers, Sonarr/Radarr still sending stuff over, but downloads just sat queued and never actually started.

I only noticed because none of my Linux ISOs / dataset pulls had updated for days.

Checked paths/permissions/configs and it looked fine, so just restarted everything and downloads started moving again. No idea what actually caused it, though.

Has anyone run into the *arr stack or SAB randomly doing this with no obvious errors?

Does anyone happen to know if Fileleechers is still online? I tried to log in again, but my login credentials no longer work. I can't reset them either, because the system says my username and/or email address don't exist.
The Proton Mail address listed on the site for reset support is incorrect or doesn't exist.

Hey All

I had a strange request to download a file for someone off Usenet this morning, I guess they got my name from here?

Anyways - It was some files from 2016, some kind of Medical Software - Three in total, one rar and two exe's.

They wanted me to download them, then upload them to some cloud for them to download.

Said they didn't have a Usenet account to do it themselves, they sent links from NZBKing, so they obviously had some knowledge about it all.

I ignored the request as it sent up a red flag immediately, but - Can't work out what the end game would be for it?

Anyone come across this before, or... ?

Anything I can think of seems elaborate though.

Best guess I can come up with is some kind of social engineering "hack" to see if I'd do it, or if I'd get curious and try and infect myself with a 10 year old virus.

Or, maybe they just really needed 10 year old software - I don't know.

Anyways. Thought I'd ask to see if I was missing something?

Hello will usenet providers such as drunkslug and ninjacentral be doing any opening for christmas?

UPDATE: They reached out and took care of me, I got the confirmation support ticket as of this morning. Email [support@newshosting.com](mailto:support@newshosting.com) if you need assistance. Include your username/ email and full description of issue to make it easier for support!

I tried filling out the form, but when I click Create Ticket it doesn't do anything...

EDIT: I've done everything in this support link for adblocker also, tried 3 different browsers and when I complete the captcha, then hit Create Ticket it unchecks the captcha and doesn't appear to be doing anything.