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 :(

  • Tinnitus@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • Alt+F4@lemm.eeOP
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      11 months ago

      Thanks! At this point I don’t yet know what an indexer is, so I guess I have much to learn!

      • MoonRaven
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        11 months ago

        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”.