Connected Guide: Newsgroups For Beginners Part III

In Parts I and II of this guide I explained what newsgroups were and gave some tips on selecting a news server provider. I’m now going to explain how to search, retrieve and download messages.

Stage I Choose a Newsreader

A news reader is a program that connects to a news server where all the messages are stored. There are several good programs on the market, but I prefer Newsleecher as I think it has the best search engine. Other good programs are Grabit, Xnews and Agent.

Stage II Setup Newsreader

Once you’ve installed your newsreader you have to enter a few settings before you can search. I’m going to run through the settings you need to put into Newsleecher, but other readers will be very similar.

i) Enter Account Details

Click on the ‘Usenet Manager’ tab and enter the server address of your news server, and your username and password if you were given one.

ii) Fetch Group List

Then click on the ‘Fetch Group List’ tab. This will retrieve a list of all the newsgroups that are carried by that news server. Depending on how fast your connection is and how many newsgroups your server provides, this could take a few minutes.

Stage III Finding messages

There are two ways to find messages with Newsleecher. You can subscribe to groups that interest you. What this does is download the headers of the groups you have selected.

Newsgroups are organized in a hierarchical structure where there are general categories containing sub-categories containing sub-categories etc. The majority of newsgroups that contain binary-encoded messages begin with alt.binaries.
From there you have an enormous selection of newsgroups packed with some very interesting things. Remember, your news server may not carry all of the newsgroups on our lists.

To subscribe to groups using newsleecher, use the search box next to the list of groups you retrieved in Stage II. When you see a group you are interested in just doubleclick it to subscribe.

Once you have finished selecting your groups, select the group you want to browse from the groups dropdown box. Then click on the big ‘Update’ button to retrieve the headers.

Once all the headers have been retrieved, you can browse through the list of messages to see what is available in that group at the time. If you decide to download something that you see listed, simply highlight it (if it has more than 1 file, highlight all parts) and click ‘Leech’ and the news reader will download the messages.

Subscribing to groups is good if you know what group the file you want has been posted in. The second way that newsleecher can find files is by using the search engine, which will search all groups for the file that you want. I prefer using this method as you don’t have to waste time downloading headers to find the file you want, and also there are so many groups sometimes I don’t even know which group to subscribe to.

To use Newsleechers search box click on ‘Super Search’ and then use the fields given to find the file you want. Again, if you decide to download something that you see listed, simply highlight it (if it has more than 1 file, highlight all parts) and click ‘Leech’ and the news reader will download the messages.

Once you’ve finished selecting all the files you want to download click on ‘connect’ and the downloads will start. To view the progress of your downloads click on the ‘Download Queue’ tab.

Stage IV Combining Files
If you have downloaded multipart messages, you will now need to use Winrar to combine them. To do this is easy. Once you have installed Winrar, just click on the ‘File Mgr’ tab within Newsleecher, find the files you just downloaded and doubleclick one of the .rar files you have downloaded and winrar will open automatically. Choose where you want to extract the files and winrar will do its magic and you will have your first newsgroup download. Piece of Cake.

Occasionally, Winrar will find errors in the .rar files or there may be some missing. To fix this problem you will need Quickpar.

When you selected your .par files for download there should have been some .par2 files listed as well. These are the files that Quickpar uses to repair .par files. To fix your .par files download a .par2 files and doubleclick on it and Quickpar will auto-launch and start evaluating the .par files. If it can repair the .par files then click on ‘Repair’. It may tell you that you need to download more .par2 files. If so, just go back to Newsleecher and download a few more. If you have a fast connection like me and an unlimited newsgroup account, just download a few .par2 files when you select your .par files so that you have them ready to go on your machine if you need them.

One last tip. Some of the files posted on newsgroups don’t use typical codecs for the video files. If you find you have a video that won’t play, install the Kazaa Lite codec pack which should do the trick.
That’s the end of my guide to newsgroups. I hope you’ve found this useful, as I think it’s a shame that so most broadband users don’t at least give them a go.

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• Connected Guide: Newsgroups For Beginners Part II
• Connected Guide: Newsgroups For Beginners Part I
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