Still Unusable For Me

[DaveXVI]

A couple months ago, I tried to give what I thought was constructive feedback on Autopar in V6 here (I didn't like that the tab was gone, and I have never liked that it downloads par files automatically, because it almost always downloads files that I didn't want or need), and was greeted with defensive responses that basically told me if I didn't like V6, just stick with V5, so that's what I decided to do.

But evidently I have recently passed some kind of threshhold in the size of my stored headers. Some groups now have over 10GB of stored headers, and even though I have NB V5 set to just load the latest 5 days of headers, about half the time when I try to load the largest groups, NB hangs while maxing out one of my CPUs. I have to shut it down to get my CPU back.

So now I understand why you needed to change the way you load headers. Since V5 is on the verge of being unusable for me, I came back here to see what was going on with V6, and found that the RC is ready for download, so I tried it.

I looked through the changes for the releases, and didn't see anything about being able to delete individual parts from the download list, which was my biggest complaint, because Autopar always manages to download pars that I don't need or want, so I want them out of the list, not just paused.

But unless I missed something, V6 still won't let us do that, so I thought, OK, I'll just have to give up the part of autopar I like, which is showing me how many blocks have been loaded. So I turned autopar off completely. I then stopped all downloads with the master pause switch on the toolbar. I then cautiously clicked on one multipart file to download. After it was in the download list, I expanded it and made sure that each part of it was also paused by the download list's pause button.

I then cautiously unpaused the master switch. All the parts in the download list remained paused. So far, so good. It's too bad I have to fight the program's "features" to make it do what I want, but I can live with it.

So now I'm ready to start downloading. Just to be super careful, I decided to unpause the parts one at a time. First the par2 file, then part1 of the main file, and so on.

I unpaused the par2 file, which only took half a second to download, and as soon as it was downloaded, Newsbin automatically unpaused the next par file, and the next, and evidently would have downloaded them all, until I hit the master pause button and then deleted everything in the download list, because that's the only option.

I checked again to make sure that Autopar was disabled, and it was.

If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand why you won't give us a switch that lets US decide whether when to download pars or not. I've given my arguments about no matter how well you code autopar, you can't account for mistakes that the uploaders make when they create the par set, so I won't dwell on that. But it seems to me that any program should have switches that let the user prevent the program from deleting or downloading anything he doesn't explicitly ask for himself.

OK, we've been over that, and I've lost that argument. But why on earth would autopar download all the pars, even though all the parts of the main file are still sitting there in the download list, and even though autopar is disabled?

[Quade]

It's not really hard to understand, you're an outlier. You want to use it the way it wasn't intended to work. It was written to use autopar. I don't pretend to understand why you don't want to let it manage the downloads. It only downloads the pars it needs (or none). If you want to sample, you can easily do that by expanding the item in the post list and just adding a couple rars. If you do that, you'll want to Ctrl-Y when you add the rest.

It's downloading all the rars BECAUSE you disabled autopar. Disabling Autopar means "download everything placed into the download list". "Scene people" do that. Some people want all the pars. Some people don't. I have an action item to add an option to pause all the pars when autopar is disabled but, it's not there yet. It's pretty low on the list because, I don't want it breaking the way things work currently and it's a mode 2 people might use. It might not make the initial 6 release even. You know you can expand the items in the post list and just add the files you want right? Say all the rars and one PAR file? The you can manually manage the rest of the pars from the post list.

As I see it, you don't want to use autopar because of the chance it might download all the pars and still not repair the files? So, you don't mind downloading all the files, even if they're not repairable but, you object to potentially downloading 10% more data represented by the pars?

[DaveXVI]

As I see it, you don't want to use autopar because of the chance it might download all the pars and still not repair the files? So, you don't mind downloading all the files, even if they're not repairable but, you object to potentially downloading 10% more data represented by the pars?

No, not at all.

I guess I've failed to convey that for whatever reason, whenever I forget to turn off autopar, Newsbin frequently downloads pars for files that are perfectly complete without them. Not all the time, but frequently. I'd say that the files I download only require repair about 2% of the time. I'd say that if I forget to either turn of autopar or delete all the par files from the par list in V5, Newsbin downloads unneeded pars about 30% of the time.

Like many ISPs, mine has a bandwidth quota, so I don't want to download ANYTHING I can't use, whether it's unneeded pars, or unrepairable files.

And maybe I'm just unlucky, maybe there's something about the particular posters who upload the particular files in the particular groups that I most often download, but even with V5, it seems like every time I forget to delete all the par files from the par list, Newsbin ends up downloading pars I don't need. Sometimes it's hundreds of megabytes, which is a significant fraction of my daily bandwidth quota. I know it's not *really* every time, but it's often enough that I think "Oh shit" every time I notice that I've forgotten to clear the Par list, and feel a real sense of relief if a bunch of pars didn't get downloaded before I noticed it.

I really don't believe that the universe is against me, and I don't think I'm incompetent when it comes to using software. I have a degree in CS, and I've been an OS specialist with a major corporation for several years. I've written code in everything from assembler to Fortran to C to C++. Nothing near as slick as Newsbin, but enough to get the job done.

So I can understand why you can't add every weird feature an "outlier" might want. But I can't understand the autopar thing. All it would take is to check a switch, and then not call the "download pars" code if it's set to no. I know there are more details than that, but looking at the list of changes you implement for each update, which is truly impressive, I can't imagine it would take a guy with your skills more than an hour or so. Probably less time than you've already spent reading and responding to me.

I think that if the useless downloads happen to me, they must happen to a lot of other people. Maybe they don't have bandwidth quotas, so they don't watch it as closely as I do, and by the time they look, Newsbin has already assembled their files and deleted all the useless pars it downloaded for them, so they don't realize how often it happens.

So all I'm asking for is the ability to stop Newsbin from downloading par files automatically. Often the useless files aren't your fault. Sometimes I can see that a file is too damaged to repair. Sometimes I can see that the uploader made a mistake when creating the par set, or uploaded the wrong par set, and the par2 file thinks that a perfectly fine download needs another thousand blocks. In both of those cases, Newsbin will download pars I don't want, even if it works perfectly.

I've pretty much accepted that we don't think alike, but frankly, your line about Newsbin automatically downloading pars *because* I turned off autopar makes no sense to me. It wouldn't make a lot of sense if it had automatically unpaused the main file parts first, because I always thought that the opposite of automatic was manual, but it makes NO sense for it to automatically unpause the pars first, which practically ensures that what is automatically downloaded is useless.

So yes, I will now be forced to use the workaround of placing individual parts of the files I want in the download list, now that I know that turning autopar off doesn't prevent Newsbin from automatically downloading par files.

You seem determined to make a product that my mom could use, but my mom never heard of Usenet. I have to think that anybody in the market for a program like Newsbin is sort of a power user, and wants more control rather than less over his programs, even if it requires editing the nbi file. The kind of guy who wants the software to make all the decisions for him is more apt to get his files from Hotfile than from Usenet. IMO.

[Quade]

You notice I didn't criticize, I'm simply saying you're using it in a way that it wasn't intended to work.

- If you turn autopar on and off in the midsts of download, I really don't know what'll happen. It probably won't work properly because it's not something I've ever tested. If that triggers it to download too many PAR files, my answer to you is "don't do that".

- If you have sets that seem to download too many pars and you haven't been toggling autopar on and off, your best bet is to PM me the subject and group. Then I'll try it myself, either find a problem or not find a problem. I'm constantly working on Autopar because there's no standard for posting. Hell, RC2 will have some significant changes. More than I wanted, because some new weird way of posting calls for it.

All it would take is to check a switch, and then not call the "download pars" code

- My post said this is on the Todo list but it's a low priority. Why don't you just delete the autopar2.db3 file, turn autopar back on and then use it? Report cases where Newsbin downloads too much and I'll see if does it for me. I'm far more likely to work on bug fixes in autopar which benefits everyone versus specialty stuff that a couple people use.

[DaveXVI]

Well, I think you answered my question. If you don't know what happens if autopar is turned on or off during a session, I don't know what to say, and I guess there's not much point in trying to use it.

I do turn autopar on and off a lot when I use V5, for a very simple reason --- I want my files decoded to an external drive, so when it fills up I can swap it out, and not have to change out my internal drives. I turn autopar on when I'm downloading RAR sets, because if I have autodecode turned off, and the pars deleted from the par list, then autopar does what I want, namely show my download progress by counting the blocks, and let me decode my files to a folder of my choice with one click when I have the external drive turned on, which may not be for a while.

But I turn it off if I'm downloading a file whose parts end in .001, 002, etc., because unless autopar is completely disabled, it insists on assembling the file in the download folder, which is not where I want it, and which doubles the space used, since the pieces are still there, too.

Obviously I don't download one file at time and then reset autopar for the next file. I queue up a bunch of files and then go do something else, and I just turn autopar on or off if I happen to look at the PC and notice that the file type has changed. I haven't noticed any ill effects from changing autopar's state in mid-download when no pars are queued. I guess it doesn't work right when they are.

So if disabling automatic download is a low priority, and you have no plans to allow us to delete individual parts of a collection out of the download list, I'll just keep autopar turned off. Since the tab is gone, and the status field no longer shows the block count, it's just not useful to me as is.

[Mastermind]

But I turn it off if I'm downloading a file whose parts end in .001, 002, etc., because unless autopar is completely disabled, it insists on assembling the file in the download folder, which is not where I want it, and which doubles the space used, since the pieces are still there, too.

You can try to download this splitted files to a different HDD and not to your default downloadfolder.
The AutoPAR is in V6 much more efficent than in V5, it only download PARs when it see a chance to complette a repair, it only download the needed number of PARs and not the biggest first as in V5.
I would give AutoPAR with V6 a new chance, use all posibilities it offers, its realy a great feature.

[Quade]

I'll move the "Pause the pars and never download them" up in my priority list. It's not going to make the initial 6 release though. I'm in feature freeze and bug fix mode right now.

[DaveXVI]

I'll move the "Pause the pars and never download them" up in my priority list. It's not going to make the initial 6 release though. I'm in feature freeze and bug fix mode right now.

I can understand that. And I appreciate your patience with me.