In Part I of this guide on using newsgroups, I explained what newsgroups were, and how they are better than P2P services like Kazaa or eDonkey for downloading files. In Part II I’m going to explain how to setup newsgroups, how to find files and how to manage them.To the casual observer, navigating and downloading files from a newsgroup takes a good deal more effort than connecting to a P2P service.

A typical download from newsgroups will require more steps than other methods because a large file is usually split into many several parts. The reason for this is that many news servers will not accept messages that are longer than 10,000 lines. A 350Mb movie would take around 7 million lines if it was encoded into one message, so big files have to broken into several parts. So to download large files you not only need a program to download the individual parts or PAR files, but to also put them together as one file.

Splitting the file into parts also makes recovery easier if there is a problem - only the parts that have errors will need replacing or repairing rather than having to possibly download/upload the whole file again.

Choosing a Newsgroup Provider

There are really only four factors you need to consider:

Coverage

Storing every post on every newsgroup would require an obscene amount of storage and bandwidth. Hence, providers tend to only cover a selection of newsgroups. For most people this is sufficient as providers will provide the most popular groups, but if you have unusual interests then it may be worth checking out whether your groups are covered.

Retention

Retention measures how long a provider stores posts in days e.g. a Retention of 3 would mean that the provider will store messages for a maximum of 3 days.

Whether or not Retention is important to you really depends on how you intend to use newsgroups. If you will be checking frequently for new posts then a longer retention isn’t important. However, if you won’t be downloading everyday or if you have a slow connection then consider going for a service with high retention. Otherwise, by the time you get around to searching for a file or by the time your connection gets around to downloading a post you’ve queued, it may no longer be available on the server.

Completion Rate

The Completion Rate is a measure of how many files are actually complete and available for download. A file may have 100 or more parts that make all the data for the file. If any of these parts are missing then you will either have to wait for someone to repost the missing part(s) or use a PAR/PAR2 (see Part III of this guide).

The higher the completion rate (eg. 95%) the more parts are getting through and the fewer files that will be missing.

Checking the Completion Rate is crucial, as it can be extremely annoying to download parts only to find that some are missing or have errors

Price

Some ISPs provide a news server, usually for free. However, they are a mixed bag and will have varying retention and completion rates.

To find out if your ISP has a news server go to the customer support section of their website and search for “news server” or “nntp”. If their website doesn’t help, give them a call and ask whether they have a news server and what the address is. In the UK I know that ntl, blueyonder and Demon run servers, although I’m not sure about other ISPs.

If your ISP doesn’t offer a good or free service then there are many 3rd party services that you can choose from. I use Giganews and if you want a reliable quality service then go for these guys as they offer an amazing retention of nearly 60 days and 99%+ completion. They have 3 packages available:

- Bronze/$7.99 2GB/month allowance
- Silver/$12.99 25Gb/month allowance
- Platinum/$24.99 Unlimited usage

I would recommend starting with the Silver package as the Bronze package is for very light usage, and packages can be changed at anytime.

For a good comparison of providers check out this site.

In the final part of my guide I will explain what software you need to access newsgroups, how to find and download posts, and how to repair or obtain missing parts.

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