Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

You will also need a good indexer. Ideally one that can be integrated into your nzb downloader and your media system. I’m using nzbget together with sonarr for TV series and a few indexers

I use Eweka, I have 5 trackers including nzbgeek and drunken slug, set up with SabNZB, and Sonarr for shows. I manually do movies by searching with NZBHydra. Shit is great man. I find everything old and new. I think you just need to mess with your setup. Usenet is 10000x better then trying to torrent everything. Torrent is great for like... Mass.downloading some older stuff maybe, but Usenet has everything you need. Yarrrr

You need 2 indexers (in case one goes down temporarily) and two providers with different backbones - one primary and one to backfill if all portions of the file you want aren't available on your primary.

Here's a good overview of Usenet backbones. For example, Newsdemon with Eweka is a decent combo.

This all works best with an *arr stack + SABnzbd. *arr apps will connect to the indexers so you can find stuff to download when you search for something - for example, Sonarr for TV shows.

When a file that meets your requirements is found, Sonarr will download the nzb file and put it in a directory that SAB watches. SAB then downloads the file and puts it in "completed" directory that Sonarr watches.

Sonarr then moves the file to that TV show's directory, which your media player (like Jellyfin) watches, and then it shows up there for you to enjoy.

If you get everything dialed right, it works perfectly and is super reliable.

I feel like it is very unlikely it was Eweka if all the files were incomplete/corrupted? They very rarely are with that service. Stuff that is like 6 or 8 years old comes down fine from there quite frequently.

I will say that if the show you are looking for is by a large enough company, they may have hired a takedown service that will delete just enough files to cause the entire thing to be corrupt depending on the newsgroup provider. Mainstream usenet service providers get hit the worst. If it’s something you really want to see, you may only have a few hours to DL it before it is corrupted in that case.

well, my experience and use of usenet is kind of limited but the really goud stuff with (mainly) working links can be found on restricted boards. you at least have to register and access is not always open.

then you need an app like sabnzb and a good usenet provider (depending on what you seek).

mirc is or at least was a free irc client but if you get access to a well managed board that has your stuff you will just need sab. and a vpn of course.

if you just surf and search on your own there is a ton of crap, incomplete stuff, wrongly labeled files etc.

Is that still a thing ?