Worth paying for a .nzb tracker site?

heyman421

banned
Do you guys think it's worth the money to pay $0.50 a week to belong to a news server tracker site, that catalogs and lists all of the binary files that are on newsgroups?

I mean, torrents are free, but newsgroups are so much faster, and never have viruses. Not to mention you download one file at a time, so it completes individual files SOOO much faster than with torrents, where you really have to be downloading 10-20 files at a time to max out your connection.

Have any of you paid for a service such as this?

I don't want to mention the actual site, since they're not a sponsor. And i'm quite sure a simple tracker site is not a violation of rules on this forum, i just don't want to mention sites that are not sponsors.

Just looking for some input.

An 8 week membership is $2 sterling, so about $5 USD.

Not much of an investment, but anything's more than using free torrent tracking sites......'

and i don't have to pay for the newsgroup service either (or usenet, as some people call it now) since roadrunner provides it for free with cable internet service
 
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1. usenet has more viruses than torrents.
2. isp provided newsgroups has less groups and crappy retentions ( usually 3 days )

if you're going to subscribe to something like that might as well subscribe to a dedicated news server.

cost me 25 a month with unlimited bandwidth + 100+ retention.
 
Well, it's probably handy, but in the end it's down to you. Personnally, I can't justify spending $2 for 8 weeks, since I would be able to get what I wanted from a standard torrent site. Even though you may see that as being cheap as chips (which it is, IMO), I wouldn't use it.

Anyway, that's just my personal opinion. :)
 
roadrunner has ~73,000 groups, 7-9 day retention for binaries, and 30 day retention for text, which isn't bad for free

not to mention they're also my isp, so it's the best connection i could possibly get, and is constantly right at 5mb/s

i HAVE considered subscribing to a server with longer retention, but my first obstacle is just being able to FIND the files i want. It's impossible just to search blindly, because a lot of files are labled in code.

Something like, say, linux wouldn't just be called "linux.rar" it would be rhl9.0.rar, there's no way to find that unless you belong to some sort of database.
 
in fact, i just looked it up, and roadrunner has increased their binary retention to 45 days!

i think i might buy a few weeks at the site. You can buy as few as 4 weeks at a time. $2-3 isn't a big deal for trying it out.

It's a lot easier to browse and find new files, too. Because with newsgroups, the only important thing is WHEN the file is posted, where with torrents, it's HOW MANY PEOPLE are seeding the file, so you can just browse by when it was listed.

I know most torrent tracker sites organize by seeders, so if you checked back for the top 100 torrents every day, a lot of times 90 out of the top 100 are the same ones as yesterday, and you never get to see what new files are up.

I think imma give it a go!
 
i bought myself an 8 week membership for ~$4, and it was totally worth it :)

LOTTTS of really rare, and hard to find stuff, and this screen shot speaks for itself :)

That's just under 50GB in less than 24 hours! Sooooo nice.

untitledzl3.jpg
 
been using newsgroups for a good long time now, currently signed up to Newsdemon on an unlimited server costing about £8 a month and its well worth it.

Never seen a single virus in all my time and i download a lot due to my work with the FME scene. Probably somoewhere in the region of 150gb a month :)
 
i thought torrents were addicting. This is just ridiculous.

I'm just using the free server through roadrunner, and so far retention has been great. Better than the 45 day advertised retention.

Only problem is, after 60+ days or so, they attempt to 'cripple' the file by removing a post here and a post there, but par files save the day in cases like that.

I just successfully downloaded and repaired a 78 day old 1.2GB binary!

Do you know anything about par files, tho? Do they actually REPAIR the file, or do they simply fill it with random code so that winrar doesn't know it's corrupt?

I mean, does it repair it with what would originally be there, or is it just a dummy file, and that portion of the data is lost?

I actually just signed on to make a post asking that question, just to see that this thread got bumped, so i figured i'd just ask here.
 
take note that isp provided news server has crappy completion rate too :) thats what the pars are for but then later finding out you dont have enough and then you had to request for a reup.
 
if every once in a while i can't get something, i can live with that

i mean, this isn't life or death :)

I'm considering just paying $10 a month or so for a backup server, for when roadrunner doesn't have something.

All i'd really need is maybe 1 gig per month, and speed isn't a concern. Just for completing files that are corrupt, or missing pieces on roadrunner.
 
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