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NZBMatrix Closes Their Website

Posted by samzenpus on from the gone-for-good dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Hot on the heels of the closure of Newzbin2, this morning the usenet NZB indexing website NZBMatrix closed shop in the face of another DMCA notice. NZBMatrix allowed users to sift through messy usenet groups and quickly find data for download. NZBMatrix's API allowed automated polling from various clients, making it one of the more popular NZB sites. This is one of the last public NZB indexing sites, leaving mostly invite-only underground sites. A sad day for usenet users everywhere."

7 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. NZBMatrix had a great community, like Demonoid by BenJeremy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You could always rely on a decent number of comments for popular releases to filter a good download form a bad one.

    Sad to see this one go, as I had relied on it more and more well before Newzbin closed its doors.

  2. Re:No More Public Usenets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The best combo is predb.me / nzbindex.nl

    Astranews sucks now too much content is missing.

    Going to need to use a NL only provider without US Servers.

  3. Re:I am not sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How is this moderated up so high. No provider was forced to shudder their doors because of the huge size of the binaries groups. Just dont carry the group. Usenet discussion died because of spam and web forums.

  4. Re:I am not sad by StormyWeather · · Score: 5, Informative

    This comment is factually correct, although it's modded down because it is contrary to someones worldview, that's often the case with Slashdot negative moderation. I used to run a NNTP server for a small ISP in 1994. I just filtered out the worst offending binary groups when the cost became prohibitive. I ran an NNTP server on a 486 with a couple scsi drives just fine with just the text groups. I can't imagine it being a "huge cost" to any ISP without the binaries.

  5. Too many people... by spagthorpe · · Score: 5, Funny

    Too many people violated the first rule of USENET.

    --

    WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
    (Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)

    1. Re:Too many people... by unr3a1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That's not really the point. Yes, Usenet is old, but it was generally unknown to the majority of your average computer users. For years, the MAFIAA has been going after torrenting, with seemingly no knowledge of the capabilities and common use for Usenet. Now all of the sudden, NZB sites and Usenet providers have been getting hit with the DMCA notices. Again, seemingly it's apparent that the MAFIAA has only recently become aware of Usenet, so spagthorpe was using a funny and appropriate movie reference to point out that a lot of people couldn't keep the Usenet secret to themselves.

  6. Re:I am not sad by water-and-sewer · · Score: 5, Informative

    The text groups are not dead; not by a long shot, and for some topics they're still a great first place to look (Perl questions or Lisp for example).

    Go to aioe.net (org?) for a free text group provider. Albasani is another, although the owner, Alexander Bartolich sadly passed away suddenly earlier this year so it's not clear how much longer that site will be around. EndlessSeptember - or something like that - is also providing free text groups.

    And the forum at www.dictatorshandbook.net is technically a news server. Connect to it with a news client (Unison, SLRN, Knode, TIN, Pine, Thunderbird) to give it a try and remember how much awesomer NNTP threads are relative to web forums or -- gack -- AJAXy Facebook-type stuff.

    --
    If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.