Is anyone using newsgroups these days? I’m noticing that while a pile of shows have come back for a new season they just don’t seem to exist in any of the indexes. Either there are far more effective takedown notices happening or something else I’m not aware of. Am I missing something here?
I still use them. Integrate real well with Sonaar.
I use Nzb.su, nzbgeek.
I use astraweb and tweaknews.
The indexers and providers seem to be working without issue, it’s just a matter of the content not being there at all, yet if I go looking through public torrents (which I don’t want to do) I can find all the things.
i still use public torrents (TPB for example) and a VPN. That said, I haven’t actually done that for yonks. Usenet is good if you have good servers, good search engine, and a decent client. NZBVortex is OK, but most of the time I still have Unison even though its long been left to rot by Panic.
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I’m giving that a go now and it’s found a few extra things. Will see how it goes.
Oh lord. I haven’t seriously used newsgroups/USENET in like 15 years or more.
Oh newsgroups… yes I remember them. Aus.radio, alt.tasteless, etc etc. we used to use Unix terminals at uni to read them.
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FidoNet anyone?
I only have 1 thing to say…
alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
For those of you sneering, I gained a great deal of benefit after I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, by visiting alt.support.sleep-disorder. There was one fellow from the UK in that group who was immensely helpful, but he passed away. It wasnt long after that, that the idiot trolls moved in. Thats what has killed much of usenet. Trolls. Otherwise its useful for some binaries. Ebooks aplenty.
I gave up with newsgroups, i used them quite a bit up to a couple of years ago.
Just became too unreliable with missing content.
Netflix has filled a lot of that void and its private trackers for the rest.
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@kyte, they certainly served a purpose… Pretty sure it was a newsgroup through which I met a local lady who had eczema nearly as bad as me… Was great to be able to spend time with someone who know what I was going through; and incidentally she was also almost as good as me at playing 500, and loving Macs… 
But I felt that they became too frustrating due to the trolls decades ago (ok, well, last century anyways)… When I looked into them again a few years back, I was surprised to find there was basically no easy free option to use them any more. I don’t know if that’s helped weed out the jerks, but from your comment, I’m guessing not…
That it has, the vast majority of the content that gets consumed in our house is Netflix or Youtube these days.
I havent looked into any of the groups I previously considered serious, for ages. I used to check in, just in case, but more often than not, there would just be a lone voice, and the trolls being nasty to him/her. alt.binaries.ebook and others like it is really all thats worth hitting unless you have a couple of servers (I only use astraweb blocks which I have been doing for years, because they dont expire)