We are just about ready to make 6.41 the final release. This one has fixes for using UNC paths and a fix for applying download paths. Unless someone reports a showstopper issue, this will become the final release. The download link is on the Newsbin Beta Page.
If you find any issues in this version, please contact us through our Technical Support Form.
This one has some changes to better handle a deluge of spam that has been hitting some of the newsgroups. A number of other issues introduced in earlier beta releases have also been resolved.
More information about the Beta 4 changes and the download link is on the Newsbin Beta Page.
If you have any questions or run into any problems, feel free to contact us through our Technical Support Form.
We have fixed the registration issue in 6.40. If you have non-English characters in your name, you'll need 6.41 to register. We also fixed some other 6.40 bugs, for example search results were all showing up as read.
You can read more about the changes to 6.41 and download it from the Newsbin Beta Page. This is still a beta release but has "safe" fixes that keep this release stable.
If you have any questions or run into any problems, feel free to contact us through our Technical Support Form.
We have discovered that our Registration Server is not working properly for any registration names containing non-English characters. The symptom is that 6.40 will appear to register correctly but then you'll get the nag screen later. We are working to get this fixed in 6.41 but currently there are only two solutions:
1) Downgrade to version 6.34, register, then re-install 6.40 or 2) Allow us to change your name to have English characters If you wish to have us change your name so registration will work in 6.40, contact us through our Technical Support Form. We regret any inconvenience this has caused.
We survived Hurricane Sandy with no downtime of our production servers. Our off-site backup server was down for 22 hours as was half our technical support capabilities but that is now back to normal.
Quade is still out of power and Internet so version 6.41 progress has been slowed. If he gets power back soon, we may still be able to put out a public beta this weekend.
Thanks for your patience if you were waiting for us to respond to technical support requests. If something fell through the cracks and you haven't heard back from us, please re-send your request through our Technical Support Form.
We are on the direct path of Hurricane Sandy and will likely lose power at some point. Our servers are in a secure data center with emergency backup power so there should be no interruption of service. The worst case is that we may be slow to respond to support requests if we lose power. If that is the case, you may be able to receive help on the Newsbin Forums from others who are not in the path of the storm or on IRC at irc.newsbin.com in the #newsbin channel.
Version 6.41 is currently in private beta testing. It addresses some issues that have been discovered in 6.40. We hope to have it publicly available by the end of this week.
Windows 8 is out today and we are getting bombarded by lost key requests from people who reinstalled Newsbin and now need to re-enter their keys. Here are some suggestions:
We received tons of messages congratulating us on our 15 year anniversary yesterday. We really appreciate the kind thoughts. We heard from several people who have been with us the entire fifteen years and are still current users so that was cool.
We are close to starting the Beta process for the next version, 6.41. The focus is to fix some issues that turned up with the new download path mechanism as well as some more esoteric problems that have been reported.
Looking at our traffic, many people are taking advantage of our free Usenet search day commemorating our 15 year anniversary. It does end at midnight though!
Another Usenet Review site had some posted a nice article about us. Check it out at UsenetReviewz.com
The guys at Newsgroup Reviews published a nice blog post about us to commemorate our 15 year anniversary.
Enjoy free Usenet searches today and feel free to offer your congratulations to the team through Facebook, Twitter, in our Forums, or directly to us through our Contact Form. You are also welcome to stop by our IRC channel at irc.newsbin.com #newsbin
Fifteen years ago today, October 24, 1997, our website went live with Newsbin Version 2.0. The Version 1 series was available for a couple of years prior to that from some ftp sites. Newsbin has been in constant development the entire time as we receive requests from our users and continue to improve the program and build the community.
To mark this occasion, we are having a Free Search Day! All day today, you can freely search Usenet from the Search tab within Newsbin and queue search results for download. If you have a "Standard" subscription, today's searches do not count toward your limits. If you don't have a subscription, use this day to find out what you've been missing!
Enjoy your free searches and feel free to offer your congratulations to the team through Facebook, Twitter, in our Forums, or directly to us through our Contact Form.
Thank you for being with us!
We have released 6.40 as the official production release of Newsbin. It is a free upgrade for all registered users and is available on the Newsbin Download Page.
The first thing you'll want to do is look at the new way of assigning the download path for your downloads. The common settings should be retained but there is much more flexibility now to better organize your downloaded files. The settings are under Options/Setup within Newsbin.
If you have any questions or issues, please contact us through the Newsbin Support Form.
We are getting reports that no new headers are showing up for alt.binaries.dvd on NewsHosting and UsenetServer. We've tested this against a couple of other servers, Astraweb and Giganews, and there are plenty of new headers showing up so it looks like it is specific to them.
We've reported the problem to NewsHosting and UsenetServer and will post an update if we hear back.
We are almost ready for the final release of version 6.40. This release will become the official production version once we get more eyes on it and verify there is nothing critical we missed. It is a free upgrade for all registered users and can be downloaded from the Newsbin Beta Page.
Please use our Technical Support form for any questions or bug reports.
We have changed how the wildcard searching works in Newsbin. You can now grab a full day of posts at a time for selected groups, and walk back a day at a time without downloading any headers. Details about this capability are on the Internet Search Help page under "Wildcard Searching".
Everyone can try it but only users signed up for the search service can queue search results for download. You can sign up by logging in to the Newsbin Control Panel and choosing the tier of service you want. Pricing starts at $2.50 per month.
The beta version is stabilizing and we are looking for input into a key new feature, dynamic path creation. This has been requested for years and we have finally implemented it. We now allow a slew of variables to be used in creating paths for your downloads. We want to make sure it isn't too complicated to use so this is your opportunity to try it out and provide feedback before it is finalized in the next production release.
You can download it from the Newsbin Beta Page.
We updated the Newsbin Search database over the weekend. Hopefully nobody noticed any downtime since we redirected traffic to our backup database. There were some periods of slow responses but all that should be gone now.
The update gives us a cleaner database with less duplication and full file counts available in the results list (Version 6.30 and higher). We have a feature improvement for the Search function in the wings that will be released in a couple of days.
If you are unfamiliar with our Usenet Search function in Newsbin, check out the Newsbin Internet Search page on our website.
The author of NBRemote for iOS has dropped the price of his application that runs on iPhones and iPads for the month of July. It is regularly $3.99 on sale now for only 99 cents! More information in the iTunes App Store.
Once Version 6.40 is out, we will get back to work on an Android version.
We've released version 6.34 which fixes a few issues that were either discovered in, or introduced in 6.33. If you use Filter Profiles, you'll probably want to upgrade. Here are the changes:
- Fixed issue with size filters not sticking in Filter Profiles.
- PAR/NFO size bypass now applies globally.
- Fixed issue with news server addresses containing the characters "none" (rare but, it happens).
To upgrade, click the download button under the "Registered Users" title on the Newsbin Download Page then run the installer. This is a free upgrade for all registered users and all settings will be retained.
Giving you a heads up that version 6.40 has a new more flexible way to assign custom paths for your downloads. We are mentioning it early because you will need to make adjustments to the path if you currently use Folder Mode. For example, to have the newsgroup in your path, you will insert the variable $(GROUP) in the path name. There are many other variables available to further customize download paths. Quade explains everything in this forum post. You need to be registered with the Newsbin Forums to read this post as it is in the members area. The changes start in 6.40 Beta 3. We will post the link for download once it stabalizes a little more, probably this weekend.
We've made another minor release to the 6.3x series to address a few more issues discovered.
- Date display issue for Age/Date (ctrl-t to toggle)
- Intermittent corruption issue when downloading very large files
- Intermittent crash issue.
If you have encountered any of these problems, upgrade to Version 6.33. It is a free upgrade for all registered users. All settings will be retained.
Some of you may remember that we polled our user base before deciding to drop support of Windows 98. It is that time again, Microsoft is forcing our hand by releasing new development tools that do not support XP. We have a decision to make, stay with the current tools and keep XP support, or upgrade to the new development tools and lose XP support. Please let us know what you think by participating in this poll. If you don't have an account in the Newsbin Forums, you can create one for yourself here.
Several people have reported that Newsbin will crash at startup after upgrading to Version 6.31. We believe it is happening to people upgrading from older versions of Newsbin. If you are going to upgrade to 6.31 from a version prior to 6.30, you should let your Download List empty before upgrading. That may get around the problem. If not, you'll have to delete the downloads.db3 database file from the Newsbin Data folder to avoid future crashing.
If you are running 6.31 and it doesn't crash right after this MOTD is displayed then you are fine, you don't have to do anything.
If you need help finding and removing your downloads.db3 database file, feel free to contact us.
Version 6.31 is now our official production release. Upgrades are free for all registered users. Download and run the 6.31 installer and it will automatically upgrade Newsbin, preserving all your settings.
There is a 6.40 already under way as we continually improve Newsbin. Quade is also working on an Android version. Progress on both fronts will be posted on Facebook and tweeted on Twitter.
We have resolved the AutoPAR issues plaguing certain people. Version 6.31 Release Candidate 8 has the fix and is available for download on the Newsbin Beta Page. We will be making it the production release later this week.
Thanks to everyone participating in the beta process and for all your helpful bug reports, comments, and suggestions.
We are fighting an elusive problem some people are reporting with AutoPAR. It doesn't seem to impact the majority of people but there have been enough reports that we do need to track it down. We are working on a new release we will offer to the people reporting issues and then will resume the Release Candidate process.
For those of you who participated in our survey, we really appreciate it and are going through the results now to see what we can learn from your feedback.
This will become the final 6.31 release unless something catastrophic is discovered. The biggest changes are to make AutoPAR more reliable. This means fewer items will be stuck in the Download list waiting for intervention.
Full details and the download link are on the Beta Release Page.
Also, we are running a survey to help us make improvements to better serve you. Please take a few minutes to provide your feedback. Responses will remain confidential. Thank you for your help!
We're always looking for ways to make Newsbin more valuable to you. Will you please take 2 minutes to answer a few quick questions?
Click Here to Start the Survey.
If you want to avoid launching Internet Explorer form here, right-click the link above, select "Copy Shortcut", then paste it into your favorite web browser.
All responses are completely confidential, of course. Thanks for your help!
Several people running Version 6.30 and 6.31 in a language other than English discovered that the "crosshair" controls in the GUI used to help place tabs when you move them around the screen were missing. We have identified the problem and have rebuilt all the existing languages to work properly.
If you are running Newsbin in a language other than English, you can get the update by running the installer again, reselect your language, and run through the upgrade process. All your current settings will be retained and you'll get your movement crosshairs back.
The download link is available on the Newsbin Download Page.
We discovered a few issues in 6.30 and are doing a quick-turn release to address them. They may not impact everyone but we decided they were important enough to expedite the fixes. The changes are:
The download link is available on the Newsbin Beta Page.
After a 3 month beta cycle, Version 6.30 is now our production release. One of the new features, video sample mode, was just mentioned on the Newsgroup Reviews Blog.
This version is an improvement over 6.21 in many ways and, best of all, it's a free upgrade to all registered users. More information about what's new in this release along with the download links are on the Newsbin Download Page.
We've fixed many issues that cropped up on XP machines in the last beta release. The big news is that Beta 6 has the much requested and long awaited for feature to automatically shutdown your PC when the download list empties. You can also configure it to hibernate or sleep.
More details about the fixes and new features in 6.30 Beta 6, as well as the download link are on the Newsbin Beta Page.
How's that for a Valentine's Day Gift?
This beta release is already better than 6.21 in our opinion. It has many new features as well as reliability and performance enhancements. Highlights include:
- New Sample mode allows you to view the beginning of a video before the entire rar set completes downloading.
- Growl support for notifying on certain events.
- Retries are now configurable. Should help for iffy connections.
- New column in Groups tab called "New Records" lists number of new posts since the last load.
- Better progress reporting in the Download tab
- Ctrl-Y to force a download now bypasses spam filters too.
- Expanded support for non-English characters in posts and for folder and file naming.
More details and the download link are on the Newsbin Beta Page.
The developer of the NBRemote program has released a free version of the app on the iTunes App Store. Now you can try it free and then upgrade to the pricey $2.99 version if you like it. NBRemote allows you to remotely control Newsbin while it is running on your computer from your iPad or iPhone.
Quade has selected development tools to start work on an Android version of NBRemote. We want to get Newsbin 6.3 out the door first. We'll keep you posted.
We've been resisting for a long time now but finally have succummed to the requests and created a Newsbin FaceBook Page. We will try to keep it updated with news of new releases and other development activies as we do for Twitter.
New FaceBook icons are now at the top of this MOTD screen and at the bottom of each page on our website. Feel free to stop by and "Like" us or whatever you FaceBook people do... ;)
We keep getting email from people in the UK saying they can't get to newzbin.com. It is true that they are being blocked by several ISP's in the UK but we (newsbin.com) are not being blocked.
If you were relying on newzbin.com for performing Usenet searches, consider using the Usenet Search built in to Newsbin. Just click the Search tab and enter a word or phrase to search Usenet. To queue search results for download, you need a subscription which starts at $2.50 per month. We provide a few free tries so you can see how it works.
More information is on our Newsbin Internet Search page.
We have started beta testing version 6.30. The most important change is that retries are configurable again. If you have an inconsistent connection or your news server is acting up, more retries can sometimes power through and successfully download items that were failing. A full list of changes and the download link are on the Newsbin Beta Page.
The Newsbin Team wishes you a Happy New Year!
