Filesharing Overview

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Download Anything Free with Newsgroups!

Like IRC, Newsgroups contain an enormous amount of files; far more than P2P or Bit Torrent. But again, it takes some learning to get good at. Although joining some newsgroups is not free, I felt like it deserves honorable mention in this e-book. For a small price, usually about $10 a month, you can have access to all of the music, movies, books and programs you will need. I don’t want to waste a lot of your time here because the main emphasis of this was for free sources. But Newsgroups have SO MANY files that I thought I’d go into them a little.

The Newsgroups are a special part of the internet that pre-dates the World Wide Web. Back when the internet was started there were special interest groups that shared information and kept in touch by using a bulletin board system (BBS). This system was designed to take advantage of the internet in a way an old BBS couldn't: each location had a machine (news server) that would store all the messages of the newsgroups that were posted by it's users. Periodically these servers connect to each other and exchange all messages that are missing on either server. In this manner, a message sent by any user would eventually get distributed to every server that carried that newsgroup.
A short time passed and the users of certain newsgroups thought that this system would be ideal to share files with each other. However, the newsgroups were not designed to transfer binary files - they can only transfer text files. To get around the problem, you have to convert a binary file to a text message. Distribute that text message through the newsgroup and then whoever wants the file can download that message and convert it back into the original binary file. And there began file sharing using the newsgroups. Luckily, there have been great improvements in the software used to download the messages from the news server to your computer that makes getting files from the newsgroups today much easier than it was when this system first appeared. A typical download from the newsgroups will require more steps than other methods because a large file is usually split into many pieces.

So is it worth it? Maybe. The newsgroups are an awesome resource, no doubt about that. Personally I get all I need and more from combining P2P, Bit Torrent, and IRC. If you are really into file sharing and are looking to build a huge library, Newsgroups may be your ticket.

Most ISP's maintain a news server that they allow their subscribers to access. Some are very good servers carrying most newsgroups and have high completion rates. Completion is simply the percentage of messages that make it to the server (low completion means a server is missing a lot of messages making downloading very difficult). The problem is that many ISP's neglect their news server and therefore have low completion rates. There are, however, many ISP's that have wonderful servers running - fast and high completion rates. The only way to know is to find out what the address of your ISP's news server is and try it out! If not, you can pay for a subscription to a news server.

There are many reasons for deciding to use a news server that you have to pay to access. You may have an ISP that doesn't have a news server. Your ISP may have a news server, but it isn't worth much because it's slow, or has a low completion rate, or doesn't carry the binary newsgroups. You may have a relatively decent news server and want a cheap news server that you can access that can fill in the missing files from your normal news server. Whatever your reason, these servers can be GREAT to awful. Usually in this market, as most, you get what you pay for. And most times you can get what you need at a reasonable price. When you sign up for one of these services they will tell you what the name of the server(s) is and issue you a user name and password that you must enter into the news reader.

Newsgroups are great because there are no queues, no need to upload or share, no spyware, and no capped speeds, depending on your ISP.

Like the other P2P networks, you need to use a program to access newsgroups. I included Forte Agent for windows.

Once you have installed and registered it you have to now enter all your ISP information in for it to work, and it's really easy.

To find out if your ISP has a news server and to find the IP address 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. Bargain ISP's (such as Netzero and Juno) generally do not maintain news servers.

First, go to the tabs on the top of the program and click the "Options" tab and select "General Preferences". Click the + next to "Servers and Accounts" to open it up and go to "News Server". Add your host name. The login method should be set to "Username and Password." Add your ISP username and password and make sure the "Remember Password Between Sessions" box is checked. That is all you have to do to set it up.

Now you need to retrieve a list of newsgroups. Go to the tabs again at the top of the program window and click "Online" and select "Get New Groups." (Once you have retrieved all of the groups you can start searching for groups to download from.) Your window view is split into three parts, and the top left section has four other sections to it. The default setting will be "All Groups." Click on the status bar and it will take you to "Subscribed Groups." (These are the groups you have subscribed to, right click on a group and pull down and select subscribe). If you click it again it takes you to "New Groups" and the final click will take you to "Folders". The only thing you need to be on is "New Groups" and "Subscribed Groups", so click through them to get familiar with each window.

Make sure the top left is on "All Groups" and click on the flashlight icon at the top of the program and type in a word, say “mp3.” It will start from the first mp3 related group. When you find a group you'd like to download from, right click that group and pull down to "Subscribe". This will add that group to the "Subscribed Groups" section I mentioned above. When you have all of your groups subscribed and you want to start downloading, click the top left window to go to "Subscribed Groups" and it will display all the groups you subscribed to.

Select all the groups by holding ctrl and clicking down the list, then when you have them all selected click on the icon on the left side which is "Get New Headers in Subscribed Groups". You only have to do this once with new groups and when you want to update the headers in any group just select it and click the icon to the right of "Get New Headers in Subscribed Groups" which is "Get New Headers in Selected Groups". Some of the sizes of some groups are quite big, so downloading all of the headers may take a while, but once they are downloaded, you have them.

After downloading all the headers, select one group and open up the "top right" window. Search down the list and select everything you want to download. When you have everything selected that you are downloading, go to the "File" tab at the top of the program and select "Save All Attachments" or just press "A" on your keyboard and it will download everything you selected. (Note: The default downloading folder is C:\Program Files\Agent.)

One more thing worth mentioning is Par files. Most games and movies are split up into equal .rar files and the .par files fill in missing data. You NEED to get them. Otherwise, you will have missing data in a lot of the .rar files when you try to extract. When you download a game, all you do is use Quickpar (get it here) on the first par file, and it will search through all of the .rar files to see which one needs fixing. Then you are free to extract your .rar's