NZBMatrix Closes Their Website 144
An anonymous reader writes "Hot on the heels of the closure of Newzbin2, this morning the usenet NZB indexing website NZBMatrix closed shop in the face of another DMCA notice. NZBMatrix allowed users to sift through messy usenet groups and quickly find data for download. NZBMatrix's API allowed automated polling from various clients, making it one of the more popular NZB sites. This is one of the last public NZB indexing sites, leaving mostly invite-only underground sites. A sad day for usenet users everywhere."
Re:No More Public Usenets (Score:5, Informative)
The best combo is predb.me / nzbindex.nl
Astranews sucks now too much content is missing.
Going to need to use a NL only provider without US Servers.
Re:I am not sad (Score:5, Informative)
This comment is factually correct, although it's modded down because it is contrary to someones worldview, that's often the case with Slashdot negative moderation. I used to run a NNTP server for a small ISP in 1994. I just filtered out the worst offending binary groups when the cost became prohibitive. I ran an NNTP server on a 486 with a couple scsi drives just fine with just the text groups. I can't imagine it being a "huge cost" to any ISP without the binaries.
Re:No More Public Usenets (Score:5, Informative)
There are some good newznab based providers that I tend to rely upon the most. They work great, and there's basically nothing stopping anybody from building their own.
There's also binsearch.info. Binsearch is easily the most comprehensive nzb index in existence, only downside is that it is also unfiltered, but the bad stuff is easy to spot (e.g. passworded rars are marked as such, and NZB's that aren't anywhere near large enough to be what they claim to be are obviously not what you're looking for.) Generally if I need something obscure, binsearch is a great last resort if nobody else has it.
Re:I am not sad (Score:5, Informative)
The text groups are not dead; not by a long shot, and for some topics they're still a great first place to look (Perl questions or Lisp for example).
Go to aioe.net (org?) for a free text group provider. Albasani is another, although the owner, Alexander Bartolich sadly passed away suddenly earlier this year so it's not clear how much longer that site will be around. EndlessSeptember - or something like that - is also providing free text groups.
And the forum at www.dictatorshandbook.net is technically a news server. Connect to it with a news client (Unison, SLRN, Knode, TIN, Pine, Thunderbird) to give it a try and remember how much awesomer NNTP threads are relative to web forums or -- gack -- AJAXy Facebook-type stuff.