Best Newsreader program?

[darkside]

Whats the best one for downloading binaries from usenet. I am trying Newsbin Pro and it seems okay. Is there a better one to go with?

[benedict]

I read this on a newsgroup last week and saved it:

MicroPlanet Gravity v2.5 (Now Freeware again)
ftp://64.36.132.56/pub/grav25.exe

XNews
(newsreader for win9x with a NewsXpress like interface).
http://xnews.3dnews.net/

Free Agent (scaled-down version of Agent)
http://www.forteinc.com/agent/freagent.htm

Noworyta (online / offline newsreader by Filip Noworyta).
http://www.newsreaders.com/link/noworyta.cgi

WinVN (hasn't "officially" been developed for years, but some development has been made by 3rd parties, latest version by Mark Spankus).
http://www.execpc.com/~mspankus

I cannot say which of those is best for binaries. I use Agent and it has always been fine.

[Edited to fix URL]

[twikoff]

agent is by far the best.. dont bother with free agent, go ahead and get the 30 day trial of the full program

[Startide]

Benedict, Thanx for the informative listing! I keep learning from your posts all the time!

Gravity is freeware since the company has announced that it stopped supporting it. *sniff* It is basically their commercial release of version 2.3 that was bumped up to version 2.5 when it was released as freeware. I've been a longtime Gravity user (back in the days when this boxed program was sold at CompUSA).

I will keep using Gravity. I love its flexible powerful rules. It does need a better OUTBOX manager that will hold things in folders rather than in one giant single folder.

[Edited by Startide on 05-11-01 at 03:20 PM]

[Startide]

Gravity has powerful rules that can do quite a bit of message selection, promotion, and demotion (i.e. ignore spam).

Example of a Gravity rule (yes, it does look like the APL programming language):

([A-Z][.,!;'`\*\-=_]){4,}

This kills all articles with four or more occurences of a capital letter followed by the punctuation marks listed. E.g. "V.I.A.G.R.A." would be killed by this rule (contributed by Alan Flanary in alt.usenet.offline-reader)

By the way, there are three usenet newsgroups that can help you get MORE out of your particular client program. These newsgroups are:

news.software.readers

alt.usenet.offline-reader

alt.free.newservers

Because Gravity excels at providing both online and offline reading, you often find Gravity posts at the alt.usenet.offline-reader group. XNews is actively supported in the news.software.readers group and 3rd party program enhancements to XNews functions are also mentioned there.

Gravity is weak in supporting high-speed connections, but XNews is evolving in that direction. For example, XNews was able to support inline images in much better fashion. For Gravity, I use a 3rd party program "Irfanview" which I highly recommend.

[Edited by Startide on 05-11-01 at 03:42 PM]

[benedict]

Thanks for the kudos, Startide! It is funny because I felt that I had been learning from your posts here! Like you, I guess I just enjoy digging for information (and sometimes posting the results where possibly useful).

BTW: I, too, use the "free" (or postcard-ware) program, Irfanview. I am told that a useful thirdparty filtering assistant (that is particularly handy for people using Free Agent) is nFilter.

[Startide]

Although this isn't a standalone newsreader program, Interbulletin does integrate a free web-based newsreader with FREE access to over 30,000 newsgroups. What's nice is that you can POST from this free interface.

[Startide]

Gravity has been upgraded to another version and it will decode yEnc type files now. Most of its other features remain the same and it is still my favourite news reader of choice. It is also freeware.

For those who don't know, "yEnc" is the next upcoming encoding standard for binary files on Usenet. It will replace UUE/MIME type files because it makes files that are 70% or smaller than they were before!!! That is a huge improvement not just in your download time, but in file retention. It is important to get a newsreader that handles yEnc as MP3 files will soon all be uploaded to Usenet using this format.

File retention you say? Yes, news servers expire articles based on a combination of age and total newsgroup byte size. The more total bytes consumed by the users from the newsgroup, the faster the articles will expire. Hence, decreasing file sizes is a big advantage in allowing files to stay around longer.

FOLLOWUP:

If you enjoy reading and/or responding to text messages, Gravity is a great choice. It supports threads as well as reply threads and you can set rules for watching certain threads in different ways as well as colours based on "scoring". If all you want is to DOWNLOAD and not upload binaries (don't care about the Usenet community), then general purpose news readers aren't as useful to you as those dedicated to downloading binaries (leech programs is the term assigned to them).

[palebluedot]

BNR2 is my absolute favorite. It allows multiple servers and multiple streams per server. It has excellent filters and search functions and natively decodes yEnc.

When you do a header pull on all servers it automatically puts all the headers from all the groups in one view so there is no more jumping around to different servers to find files.

Most newsreaders especially Agent don't even come close to the power of BNR2. Agent doesn't allow for multiple servers or multiple streams, with BNR2 you cut your download time in half.

Get it here...

http://www.co.jyu.fi/~ap/bnrdown.html

[zuffy]

Xnew is the best for binaries, not I like would use it for articles Very easy to use and with those keyboard mappings... things get easier and it's FREE.

[Xanager]

another vote for BNR2.

It is the absolute best, especially if you use more than one server.

i.e. I have a crappy ISP news server then I pay for a Giganews server. My ISP normally has some missing parts, so I use the Giganews account to pick those up. In BNR2 you can assign the servers different priorities, so your crappy ISP account picks up everything it can, then your pay account gets the rest. This saves me tons of money and tons of time.

BNR2 is still in the beta stage. The author also wrote the original BNR which I thought was the ultimate program except for the lack of yEnc decoding and bandwidth control. To be honest, I do catch a bug every now and then, but the program still beats all others in my opinion. I haven't tried the Gravity program though; I need to check it out. I have used Agent, Easyreader, XNews, and Newsrover. BNR2 is better.

Another pro for BNR2 is the bandwidth control. When I want to download 1 gig worth of material, but I want to surf the net at the same time, then I can limit the server download speed. My roommate, who is hooked up to the same connection also appreciates this feature

[AndyCapps]

Originally posted by darkside
Whats the best one for downloading binaries from usenet. I am trying Newsbin Pro and it seems okay. Is there a better one to go with?

That's which one I'm currently using. I used Newsshark in the past, but something made me switch that I can't recall right now.

[omi]

I use Forte Agent v1.91 to read text posts and Newsbin Pro 4.0B28 for unattended binary downloads.

[wiz]

Personally I use Newsbin Pro for binaries. I just use OE for reading discussion groups.

[AndyCapps]

Originally posted by palebluedot
BNR2 is my absolute favorite. It allows multiple servers and multiple streams per server. It has excellent filters and search functions and natively decodes yEnc.

But it was written in Delpheeeeeeeeeeeeeee. I have a bad impression of Delphi because of the contractors who just walked in. They're working on a plant scheduling package that everything will rely on. If it doesn't work right, I'll get calls about all of my applications being wrong even though I have no control over the scheduler.

I ran into my first yEnc posts last night, and I needed something to take care of it. The Gravity site was down, so I downloaded bnr2. I've been spoiled by the more intuitive interface of Newsbin Pro. The multiple server feature is nice, and the multiple streams would be cool but I didn't see how to get it to do that(I just spent enough time with it to get a list of newsgroups, subscribe to one, get the headers, and start downloading the ones I wanted).

[Dave99]

Nice thing about using easynews is they are automagically decoding yEnc. I like that, and of course now it's so easy to get more than 6 gigs a month for the same money.

Dave

[Xanager]

Yeah, I'll admit the interface of BNR2 isn't the prettiest in the world, and it might even be confusing at times, but it gets the job done.

To get the multiple servers and streams, you must first enter in two or more servers (obviously). If you want one to take a higher priority, right click the server, configure, advanced tab, and specify the preference. If you have the preferences set the same I believe both servers just download anything they can.

[Startide]

The Super Gravity site has changed locations. It is now at:

http://gravity.tbates.org/

and a mirror site for the above is at:

http://lightning.prohosting.com/~tbates/gravity/

It is up to version 2.6 now. It's amazing to see Gravity continue to get support from an ex-Microplanet employee (Al Choy) although the company is out of business. I'm glad that the company changed Gravity over from a for-pay program to a freeware before they closed shop. So many other companies don't bother to do that.

FOLLOWUP:
April 25, 2002 -- Super Gravity ver. 2.6 build 2039 released.

[Kevlar]

I have verizon DSL and I used regular BNR quite a bit, still do unless I want something y enc, then I use agent.

BNR logs me onto my verizon news server 4 times, I just changed the server setting to '4' (max). I could not get BNR2 to log me into the same server 4 times.

Is there a trick to that, or is it possible to use the same server 4 times like I can with regular BNR? Agent is nice for yenc files but only 1 connection doesn't come close to using my available bandwidth. 4 connections going with BNR causes some noticeable drop in my web page loading times =)

-K

[das Monkey]

Originally posted by palebluedot
BNR2 is my absolute favorite. It allows multiple servers and multiple streams per server. It has excellent filters and search functions and natively decodes yEnc.

When you do a header pull on all servers it automatically puts all the headers from all the groups in one view so there is no more jumping around to different servers to find files.

Most newsreaders especially Agent don't even come close to the power of BNR2. Agent doesn't allow for multiple servers or multiple streams, with BNR2 you cut your download time in half.

Exactly. If your goal is to download binaries, don't waste your time with these other "pretty" readers. XNews and Agent are weak in comparison to BNR2, especially Agent. Sure, if you're reading rec.animals.cute-puppies or something, Agent may do the trick, but if you're downloading binaries, BNR2 will set you free, especially if you are like most of us: one free NNTP with average retention/completion and one or more pay-per-gig NNTP with great retention/completion. BNR2 combines segments wonderfully, so that every possible segment is grabbed from the primary (free) NNTP and segments are only filled from the pay service when absolutely necessary. The UI isn't pretty, but I don't stare at my downloads. I set them and move on. Pretty isn't important.

das