SABnzbd Forums

With NZB sites dropping like flies, it seems fairly clear that the only permanent solution to this situation is just to have the NZB clients, themselves, scour the newsgroups for articles containing NZB's and just indexing them themselves.

This seems very doable, as the clients wouldn't need to download complete headers, just the Subject line (if the NNTP server lets you specify the header fields you want). And they wouldn't need to keep a whole lot of the articles, as a *vast* number of the articles are the binary messages, themselves, and only a fraction are the NZB's. And, even though the NZB's are small (and *highly* compressible), the client doesn't even need to house them all: it just needs to index Subject lines to message-id's, and then it can just go *get* the actual NZB if the user wants it.

I figure that this *has* to have been discussed before (but searching this forum for "NZB indexing" yields a bazillion hits). What has been the consensus on this?

There is already a similar system: SpotNet. http://www.spot-net.nl/ A distributed system of spots (pointers to NZBs) and comments, using newsgroups as transport layer.

It's developed by Dutch people, so the program itselfs and the content is mostly Netherlands oriented.
However: the system works regardsless of content, so it deserves a wider audience than the Netherlands only.

jemenake wrote:With NZB sites dropping like flies

NZB sites are not, in fact, "dropping like flies". The only sites that went down were Newzbin and NZBMatrix. Since then, a bunch of new perfectly good alternatives have cropped up. Several of them are listed here.

Any chance of adding www.nzbfinder.ws to that list? :-)