NewzNab right out of the box!
This turnkey project should help get you up and running quickly. Hopefully I can play with it this week.
nzbX.co is quite the stand out right now. The owner has multiple EC2 instances running the frontends of his indexer, and seems to be coding the site near around the clock. Adding features left and right. Including Sickbeard integration and even being able to upvote comments. It’s a pretty massive undertaking for just a single person. Not to mention the monetary resources to run it all, for free no less.
nzbX.co is completely free, for now anyways. Yet is bound to be the next high profile public indexer. Running Amazon AWS servers would seemingly put a big DMCA target on your back, but who knows. I’d love for this site to work, but I have my doubts. Already he’s had his paypal account suspended. Not even a week in and already there is a little heat. Nonetheless, I really want this site to work out. Everyone should read the nzbX.co dev blog.
PrivNZB has gone the other route. Smaller server running straight NewzNab. But they’re charging $30 for VIP. Granted, that indexer only plans on serving maybe a few hundred people. And who wouldn’t want to be apart of a very secretive private indexer. Being a smaller target, they’re not likely to attract a lot of attention. But $30 is a lot, especially for something so new. I’m not sure if any NewzNab site is worth $30 when there are still others that are cheaper or free. But I know a lot of you don’t have a lot of choices and worry about the future.
NZBs.in has open registration, but they’re getting slammed hard.
Only a matter of time before they close registration, so hurry.
Edit: Try out omgwtfnzbs
Check comments for more.
I know everyone is frantically looking for invites right now. But there are going to be very few invites given out. All the major indexers have manually zeroed out all of invites for their members. Obviously, the huge wave of NZBMatrix refugees is making things difficult.
I wouldn’t give up hope, you may have some success in their IRC channels. But for now, you guys should rely on the header searches and the header search method I outlined in the previous post.
You wouldn’t be the only one. Apparently the staff decided to prune a ton of the free accounts on the site. VIP members and a few free accounts remain. Hopefully you know someone with a VIP account that can give you an invite, or you’ll be really out of luck.
For those of you with free accounts that didn’t get pruned, remember that your account can be deleted at any time. The only way to secure access to the site is to make sure that you have a paid VIP account. $7.50 isn’t such a bad price for everything you get.
NZB.su no longer uses paypal for their payment gateway. It looks like they are taking the credit card information directly now. That alone makes me a little weary.
If you have an account on NZBs.org or DogNZB, you probably won’t be missing out on much.
Edit: I talked to the owner of NZB.su, and he told me that they do have a proper credit card processor and there should be no worries. No credit card information is stored on the site. So there should be no worries there.
Astraweb’s automated DMCA takedown process is likely the reason why people are seeing so many complete takedowns lately. An Astraweb employee confirmed it last week on the NewsBin forums. Here is a picture of the relevant post just in case.
Astraweb has gone the path of least resistance. I understand after seeing what happened with a company like MegaUpload why they’d rather just take the easy way out.
No one wants to get shut down by the US government or have their domains seized. Astraweb definitely wants to protect their US based server farms. Having a US presence is starting to become quite a hindrance.
There is an alternative path, that Astraweb doesn’t take. It would be better for everyone involved and wouldn’t require that much extra work. A lot of hosting companies, as a way to prevent frivolous DMCA takedowns and abuse, require a very formal DMCA takedown procedure, and they review all takedown notices manually. Yes, I realize it would take a bit more time and resources, but it’s the only way to make sure that no one is abusing the system. Whereas Astraweb seems like they just let you shoot an email over, and a bot takes care of the rest.
I’m all in favor of respecting DMCA takedown requests. I understand that they have to be processed, but I don’t see the point in letting it be so easy for people to easily abuse the system.
Couchpotato looks completely different now. I haven’t installed it on my own box just yet. But it’s looking really good.
For the uninitiated, CouchPotato is an automatic NZB and torrent downloader for movie. Like most of these projects, it works with SABnzbd. You can easily add movies into a ‘I want’ list, and CouchPotato will do the rest.
As always, I recommend running from the Python source, as that will always keep you up to date.
https://github.com/RuudBurger/CouchPotatoServer/blob/master/README.md
Don’t forget to friend them on Facebook too
https://www.facebook.com/CouchPotatoApp
I saw that in the dashboard for incoming search links, and it made me laugh a little. I always like it when people are asking their search engines honest questions .
Although, to answer this question, I guess it really depends on what you mean by censoring. Most people who happen to run across this site will probably be looking for files. I’ve talked about how Giganews, Astraweb, and Highwinds all do DMCA takedowns. I’ve always been a big proponent of getting a euro block account. No way around it, in my opinion.
But what if this guy wasn’t wanting to download files? What if he was one of these old school dudes who was in it for the text discussion. In my experience, this one can get kinda tricky. Well, maybe not. The only issue I’ve ever seen is that Giganews, at least in the past, wouldn’t always show PGP signed messages from users that had posted them. Giganews would show PGP signed messages from users on other providers. Haven’t tested if this is still the case.
news.mixmin.net is my favorite for just regular straight up text. You won’t get any binaries here, but it is good for text. Most people I know think of it as a pro-free speech anonymous usenet provider. Haven’t quite tested that. To post I believe you have to use SSL on port 563.
In the last few weeks, Astraweb stopped accepting Paypal. No explanation was given. It wasn’t that big of a deal since they have other credit card processors, but everyone likes PayPal. It was a little weird, but no one really thought much about it. Now it turns out that Highwinds might be having a problem with PayPal as well.
Some people are reporting that Highwinds resellers that accept PayPal are censoring their Usenet feeds. It probably as something to due with the adult content that is readily found on Usenet. PayPal won’t do business with companies who sell adult content.
I know the conspiracy theories might be flying around. With MegaUpload getting shut down and other sites following suit, the adult content clause is a convenient way to start distancing themselves from Usenet. Not terribly surprising.
The other provider I know off hand that accept PayPal is Blocknews. So far they seem to still be accepting PayPal. Although, I don’t know if they’re using the same tactic as Highwinds and only selectively censoring PayPal customers. So keep an eye out if you’re having problems.
Astraweb rolled out 2 new plans today. First plan is a 1 TB block account for $50 US Dollars. The second one is a quarterly unlimited 10 mbit account. Both are pretty good. If you’re internet connection isn’t faster than 12mbit, I’d really look at the 10mbit unlimited account. The 1TB account is so monsterous that I can’t even imagine going through that in a year. No, actually, I could go through that in a month, but still. I don’t know if I’d want to prepay that amount for Usenet. But it’s a really good deal regardless.