AT&T West → I have a quick question about newsgroups

Alright, I recently bought a subscription to EasyNews for a month, and it just expired today. I realised that SBC had the group that I was interested in, so I set up XNews to connect to the SBC newsserver and I was able to access the group. While the EasyNews online newsreader was MUCH easier to use that having to configure XNews and finding info for getting the SBC news to work, I thought it would be worth it to save $10 a month.

Now, despite the fact that I've used newsgroups, I barely know anything about it. I know basic things like retention and bandwidth limit: What's the retention and bandwidth limit with the SBC service? Is there anything else that I need to know about when using the SBC Newsgroups?

From what I read here from people who used it the bandwidth is slow and the alt.binaries are missing by most part. I can't speak for myself since I don't use them.

I don't have a comparison for retention, but since the binary groups are not served the retention seems reasonable to me. There isn't a bandwidth limit that I know of.

The binary group that I wanted is there.

However, I have another question: I entered the group, and almost all the files there had the "3 cube" icon, which according to an XNews guide, means that the file is incomplete. Is it normal for almost all files to be incomplete like that?

Yep, SBC's servers are pretty much crap. In fact, crap is a compliment. Almost everything is incomplete, so no matter what the bandwidth is the result is still the same:

128kbs * 3-connections * missing posts&groups = 0MB downloaded

line-speed * 3-connections * missing posts&groups = 0MB downloaded

One more question: Is it possible to download the partial files from the SBC Newsgroups, and then use a different news server to complete the download?

For example, there are large sets posted on the group that are then put up on BitTorrent a few days later. It appears I can download all the partial files, and then when I start them up with BitTorrent, I already have a percentage of the download completed.

I was thinking of getting something like TeraNews, but the 50MB limit is kind of low, but if it can fill in all of the missing parts from SBC, that would be a cheap and easy way to complete my files.

said by firestorm225:

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One more question: Is it possible to download the partial files from the SBC Newsgroups, and then use a different news server to complete the download?

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That's exactly what I do. I use SBC's servers, but fill the missing parts using a combination of free servers and combining them with NewsPlex.