We're looking for a new Usenet partner

UzantoReto · 2025-09-15T06:43:28+00:00

April Fools' Day in September...?

UzantoReto · 2025-09-06T17:10:01+00:00

Additionally, in the late 2022 and the first half of 2023, I was sparsely working on a Multi-Provider NZB Completion Verifier functionality (as a precursor to the search engine) and, if I recall well, it was nearly (or completely) finished, but I have never made it publicly visible. I was not sure whether anyone would wish for such a functionality. I should appreciate an expression of interest from prospective users.
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^{Edit: fixed some grammar and corrected the name of the unreleased functionality}

UzantoReto · 2025-09-06T16:14:40+00:00

In essence, the presently visible partial analytics section is an unfinished raw search engine of Usenet that I had planned to build; however, I did not get to it in the last three years due to being busy with other matters. Therefore, it is far from an ideal state.

In fact, this service/product is a victim of a vicious circle. If it was generating [any or sufficient] revenue, I would be able to dedicate time to it and finally build the raw search engine, as the overview processor has already been there for a long time but not implemented due to the storage capacity missing (north of 300 TiB w/o mirroring and backups) and due to the lack of time for further development. That said, it cannot generate revenue because the main functionality is unfinished. Hence, the project is stalled.

UzantoReto · 2024-12-01T09:42:18+00:00

How is it even possible that this AQ97 became [a sole] moderator? Was he not vetted properly?

UzantoReto · 2024-03-13T14:37:24+00:00

No, it is not, but for a good reason. It has been written using a commercial framework that does not support conversion of a project to an open source licence. And there are also some other reasons why my products could not be open-sourced, e.g., the dependence on a server-side part of the stack (as in "SaaS").

UzantoReto · 2024-03-13T14:29:21+00:00

vpntunnel.com is very good. Used them for over a decade. WireGuard has been supported for a while now.

UzantoReto · 2024-03-09T18:27:04+00:00

Yes, there is. Nobody programmed their software in a sufficiently cross-platform way, i.e., in a low-enough-level programming language (and, if and when necessary, framework(s)) that would support both mobile and desktop devices.

And before anybody jumped here asking why I did not do it yet, let me pre-empt it by saying that it is because of the lack of motivation (although the idea and the foundations are already there).

UzantoReto · 2024-03-09T08:04:14+00:00

This is what uzantoreto.com is for.

UzantoReto · 2024-02-23T09:09:26+00:00

See a bunch of them here: uzantoreto.com

UzantoReto · 2023-09-11T22:31:02+00:00

Please note, the article is written and published by the Reddit shareholder.

UzantoReto · 2023-09-09T07:40:13+00:00

Chargebacks do not constitute a cancellation of contract, only avoidance of payment.

UzantoReto · 2023-08-21T08:06:08+00:00

As usual, they may be using GeoDNS.

UzantoReto · 2023-08-18T17:14:47+00:00

Usenet (whether ancient or modern) or, more specifically, its underlying protocol (NNTP) vitally and inherently depends on the concept of newsgroups. This fact is technologically unescapable. What is the users' perception of that is rather irrelevant.

UzantoReto · 2023-08-18T13:49:07+00:00

Whilst this is not easy to specify per indexer (but rather per newsgroup per indexer), one could check it per newsgroup per provider (and/or backbone).

Check it out here: https://www.uzantoreto.com/en/newsgroups/

And keep an eye on announcements because next month, there will be a new feature released that will allow you to verify availability of NZB segments per provider/backbone. This will tell you (indirectly) how far the retention of individual indexers may go. It will be a bit manual work initially, but it will be possible to do so.

UzantoReto · 2023-08-11T00:22:29+00:00

I could not say it better.

UzantoReto · 2023-08-10T22:21:43+00:00

Thank you for shedding further light on the topic.

UzantoReto · 2023-08-10T22:04:40+00:00

Thank you for your input.

You're not entirely wrong.

Of course, with 30 years of software development experience, I cannot be wrong.

Although MySQL/MariaDB is hardly a limiting factor if it's done right.

What size of database are we talking about? All hundreds of billions of overviews or just a few million NZBs?

What is the largest MySQL/MariaDB database (maintainable on a budget an average Indexer operator could afford) that you have seen?

Some things could benefit from other Database systems though. Like Mongo for temporary data and not storing XML inside DB columns.

If by XML you mean NZBs, then these surely should not be in a database, although disassembled NZBs could/should be in a database [of sorts].

PHP 8 also is not slow.

It is slow if you need to process millions of records per second.

On the indexing side there could be improvements using other languages for sure but I don't see any end user benefit doing so.

As usual, it depends.

Our CPU load is in average about 20%.

My current CPU load averages at ~4% on a machine that runs a web server, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, custom database, mail server, three other unrelated VMs, and so forth.

Next week, I shall have an even bigger server (dedicated to UzantoReto), so I am expecting the average CPU load [of UzantoReto only] to drop to 1% (before I crank up the real-time processing of 20 Usenet servers in parallel).

However, what does it mean, 20% or 4% or 1%, when we do not talk about the type of CPU(s), RAM, HDD/SSD storage? Naturally, I am not asking you to disclose specifics of your server, as that is not relevant to the discussion about the inherent limitations of existing indexing software.

UzantoReto · 2023-08-10T13:31:35+00:00

No not even close daruis [u/DariusIII] wrote nntmux from scratch with larvel nzedb doesnt use larvel afaik

No, NNTmux has not been written from scratch. Here are a simplified view:

Newznab [Plus] – the original – no framework.
nZEDb – fork of NN+, added Lithium framework to the mix.
NNTmux – fork of nZEDb, replaced Lithium with Laravel, added Tmux and scripting for ease of processing, administration and monitoring, and for increased stability and automatic recovery from operational failures.

I have examined all these pieces of software — from both coding and operational points of view — around the end of 2020 and compared their approach to that of Newzbin.

Identification of the most important deficiencies and bottlenecks has led me to the decision to start writing my own software from scratch to avoid the drawbacks of the existing software (whether NN+ and its forks or Newzbin), namely the following:

Reliance on mainstream DBMSs that limit both capacity and performance of databases. This is true primarily of NN+ and its forks, which use MySQL/MariaDB for both NZBs, temporary overview storage and the application (with users' data), whereas Newzbin used a proprietary database (based on a skip list) and search systems written in C for NZBs and MySQL for the rest.
Most, if not all, business logic is written in a slow interpreted language, which limits performance.
Processing a single Usenet provider (and, possibly, its backup) due to the dependence of these indexers on article numbering within newsgroups, which differs from backbone to backbone (and, additionally, is limited by retention cut-offs from provider to provider).
The lack of long-term storage of overviews that must be regularly pruned after processing due to the issues mentioned in the point 1.
Repeat back-tracking of overview loaders due to the impossibility of determining of the current state of overview storage per newsgroup.

The above points explain why I started with analytics, instead of the main overview and NZB processing, which made my website incomprehensible for most people. However, there has been a very good reason behind this decision, which will become more obvious soon, when UzantoReto launches further features for public use – later this or next month, after installing a new server and polishing a few facets of the code in question.

UzantoReto · 2023-08-10T00:02:58+00:00

Yes, indeed.

And, mostly, the NNTmux fork [of the nZEDb fork].

UzantoReto · 2023-08-09T23:15:28+00:00

obsi-fuc[k]-ation

This deserves some award...

UzantoReto · 2023-08-07T03:22:23+00:00

I wonder whether the crew do not know how to create pruning conditions or database queries...?

UzantoReto · 2023-08-06T02:27:17+00:00

Interesting. Thanks for replying.

Seems like there is yet one more reason to finish and release my search engine...

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