Comments on: Pan Newsreader

By: me

me — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 02:05:05 +0000

…just fell over laughing when I heard the arrogant pronouncement regarding Usenet’s “intended purpose.” Get real. Yes, you can do nothing but post text messages to newsgroups if you want, then again, you can use a Ferrari exclusively for trips to the corner market if you want….but you’d be missing out. And you’d look really goofy trying to convince others that they should never use their Ferraris for anything else.

By: reid

reid — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:45:52 +0000

I’ve been trying to get some info on Google Groups (GG) and stumbled on this forum. I see that some people here think GG is good for reading news. Its glaring weakness vs. dedicated newsreaders, to me, is the fact that it can’t seem to track read/unread messages. It has a concept of “new” messages, but that status is unrelated to whether I’ve read a message or not. I like the idea of a web-based news reader and could live without some of the more esoteric features of a newsreader, but not tracking what’s read/unread is a real pain when trying to follow conversations! Am I missing something? Do other people mainly use GG for just digging through archives, which it’s fine for?

I hope the GG folks are working on this capability…. They have it working for Google Reader.

By: Rick

Rick — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:29:25 +0000

Pan now handles nzb files. No encryption tho. I have an ssh book here. I plan to read it eventually to see if I can set up an ssl tunnel for Pan. It still has no encryption.

By: Dante

Dante — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:02:47 +0000

Thanks for the pointer Gary. But I’ve found the discussions on newsgroups to be rather slow in response and filled with lots of stupid spam like incest.com or some such idiocies. For detailed discussions on coding or drivers, I generally search for a relevant forum site and just peruse.

As to the other standard reply when one doesn’t know a good answer: don’t ask what is, ask what isn’t… eh. For your info, I’ve looked at google news. It’s extremely limited. And any groups with a remote possibility of binaries being posted is censored off the group. Makes for useless newsgroups when one is looking for technical stuff.

By: Jono

Jono — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 04:28:23 +0000

It’s more like what _isn’t_ being discussed on newsgroups.

Browse around Google Groups…search on a subject you’re interested in and see what’s there.

Google Groups is currently listing around 10,000 groups.

By: Gary Littleton

Gary Littleton — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 02:57:27 +0000

I’ve been reading and posting in newsgroups since the early 80s. Nowadays forums have taken the place of many, but there are still a few I read: alt.comp.freeware, alt.comp.opensource, etc. A big problem with usenet was lack of spam protection, and so now many bots post on the groups. One thing about the newsgroups is there are many specialized ones that have been around a long time. For example when I was writing windows network device drivers the best place for me to get answers was on the microsoft newsgroups. I’m also using the newsgroups less and less for downloading binaries and bittorrent is faster and more efficient for most stuff. Cheers, Gary

By: Dante

Dante — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:20:53 +0000

Ok. Now my interest is peaked. What do people discuss on newsgroups now-a-days? I thought it all went to instant messengers and specialized blog sites like for boy scount get togethers, et al.

By: Jono

Jono — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 17:30:55 +0000

I’m not saying that the Usenet should be pure to it’s original purpose. I just wanted to point out that there is more to it than binaries.

The newsgroups are still a great place to communicate with large groups of people. It’s all about two-way communication. Blogs are mostly one-way communication–except for small amounts of comments you get like this.

There’s currently about 20 newsgroups that I monitor and partake in. I’ve pared the list down a quite a bit from what I used to monitor and limit it mostly to local, industry and software support groups. There are groups for any topic and local you can think of.

Saying that the Usenet’s main purpose these days is to distribute binaries is ridiculous. It certainly makes up the most amount of data being shuffled around, but most people still use the Usenet for conversation and it’s still very active.

By: Dante

Dante — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 13:03:17 +0000

Newsgroups used to be a good medium to post one’s ramblings and ideals. But now blogs does a much better job at it. Newsgroups main purpose now-a-days is the exchange of binaries. Saying newsgroups should be “pure” to it’s original purpose is like saying the WWW should be pure to it’s BBS origins. Makes for one useless and dull Internet experience.

Just curious though. What use do you guys find in just reading newsgroup postings. It helps with any problems? Solves anything? Provide news? Anything that a quick Google or Yahoo search wouldn’t have solved without having to wait for a post?

By: Gary Littleton

Gary Littleton — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 07:37:02 +0000

For reading and writing text messages on newsgroups xananews is an excellent choice. If you want to scan and selectively download binaries (software, mp3s, movies) grabit and xnews both work well.

If you want to just blindly download lots of binaries from one or more groups (erotic pics, mp3s, etc) then the cheap quadsucker news is very fast and a good value.

Cheers,
Gary

By: Martin

Martin — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 06:32:34 +0000

Well you are right that Newsbin has only one real purpose and that is downloading binaries from the Usenet.

Pan on the other hand tries to be a good program for downloading binaries and for the discussions.

By: vienastoks

vienastoks — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 04:27:08 +0000

We can has some peace?

Regardless of what Usenet was intended to be it evolved into binary (as in stars) system of textual discussions and files groups. So you actually need two newsreaders to use it all, or choose one depending on your preference for the content.

By: Jono

Jono — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 23:21:14 +0000

Google Groups is only useless if you want to download binaries, which is not the Usenet’s intended purpose.

You seem to be under some misapprehension as to what Usenet is about - it isn’t online chat like Messenger/AIM/MSN or for phone-like conversation. The Usenet is really most useful in the exchange of ideas and information between large groups of people.

By: Dante

Dante — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 22:48:07 +0000

Google Groups is useless. If you want to chat, go to chatlines like Yahoo Messenger. Or better yet, pick up a phone - it’s still the best voice email system out there. Usenets (newsgroups) are most useful when you can download software, drivers, pics and other multi-media files. Google Groups does not allow these files. I personally use SMBaker’s AndroidNews. Great for downloading 5 gig iso files that’s been parsed into multiple rar or split files.

By: Jono

Jono — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 19:54:19 +0000

Well, newsbin isn’t what I’d call a newsreader…that’s not exactly its intended purpose .

For actually reading newsgroups I use google groups.

By: Alter Falter!

Alter Falter! — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 12:24:21 +0000

I’m using NZB-o-Matic +

I haven’t figured out yet how to read and ssl write with it though…

By: :)

:) — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 10:12:22 +0000

I’m using Thunderbird

By: vienastoks

vienastoks — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 09:52:16 +0000

I’m using GrabIt (www.shemes.com). It’s stable and comfortable, but I’m not sure about SSL. And it’s not suited well to post messages either.

I kind of hope somebody would do a newsreader review so that I could pick a better one for myself. Doesn’t have to be free, cheap would be OK