Feature Requests

[richy99]

put what you would like to see in v6 here so that quade can think about your ideas/suggestions, it also keeps it all in one place rather than having it clutter up other threads

[Semel]

As of now I have just one feature request. Well, i guess its not a "feature" but improving already present feature.

- Reduce auto update groups limit from 1 hour ) to 1-5 minutes minimum.
This one

It is really important for some people to have specific groups updated automatically often.

Usually they keep retention ar 1-2 days for these often updated groups.We are interested in 0-day stuff.

Its only the small ammount of headers get downloaded every 1(5) min(since its often) besides the load on NNTP providers side is minimum compared to usual downloads(DVDs,games,blurays, hundreds and hundreds Gigs of information each day) so i dont see how getting a small ammount of compressed headers(being already connected to nntp provider) makes its life harder

1(5) min is a reasonable interval.

Perhaps make it available to change via INI file or wherever ver6 settings will be stored

[gunman99]

I am happy user of newsbin 5.58. Also happy customer of newsbin search.

Newsbin search allows me to limit searcvh based on age. Would be very useful if I could use it. Now I can't.

I am only allowed to limit search based on age for 12 hours - 6 months.

My news server has got longer retention than 6 months. Searched limited based on age would only be useful to me if it could be specifiecd in days, and with a maximum value of several years.

Just a few samples, giganews 800 days (more than 2 years), supernews 500 days (much more than a year).

I would like a field where I can enter age in years.

[Ortep]

It would be nice if there was a better way to clean the junk that stays behind after autorar.
When you use NZB's the 'download' folder often contains a lots of garbage. Things like an NZB, a srr, sfv, nfo, par2 sample etc.

I spend quite some time checking my download directory for things that may be of interrest. I have to open al subfolders and look if something usefull is there and if not, delete the directory.

I would like an option to give NPB a list of file names (*.nfo, *.sfv etc)to delete after autopar is finished. And delete empty folders afterwards. That way I would be sure that if a directory excists, it contains something unexpected that I have to check.

Or, if you dont want to do that, give me the option to run a batch file on the download directory after autopar succesfully finished. Then I can do the cleaning or other houskeeping myself.

[richy99]

Filters :
- being able to use the drop down and when not selecting a new filter for it to go back to the one that was just on used rather than defaulting to blank as it does currently
- the ability to use filters in the search tab when using local search
- an inverse option to reverse the current filter, dont know if this is possible or not with regex
- custom age range for seaching rather than the predetermined values currently
- custom file size for min/max ranges

Group tab showing last update on the actual GOG rather than individual groups, currently the GOG has to be expanded to see last update, the only issue i can see is that people might update the indivual groups and they wont all have the same last update time so the last update on the GOG would be incorrect

Possible update to the par library with this one (unsure of the feasibility) : http://paulhoule.com/phpar2/index.php

[rochlin]

RE - Interface.

in v5.x (and earlier), the user double-clicks on a folder name in order to download the latest headers.
Personally, almost as often as not, I've found that double clicking on the folder name will highlight it so I can change the name instead of downloading the headers.
Annoying. I know Windows itself has a similar design flaw, but somehow, Windows seems to make more of a distinction between the different timing of double-clicks for renaming vs opening.

Suggestion: I don't know if the v6 GUI will be vaguely similar or not, but my proposal would be to have a check box next to each of the folder (and within a folder, each group maybe). Then to open all the checked folders, you would click an OPEN button or something like that.

That could be in addition to the old double-click method, if you prefer. The program could also remember which folders where checked in the previous session and leave them checked. Each folder headers list would open in its own tab still (if that option is selected in the preferences) even though they're all selected at once.

I tend to have some Every Day folders and some Once Every So Often folders/groups. I imagine that's similar for a lot of people.

I know I can highlight folders and type Cntl+G, but that feels awkward to me. vs mousing.

[dexter]

It uses standard Windows double-click timing. Fast double-click launches it, slow double-click switches to modify mode. If you are a little slower on the double-click than average, you could look into adjusting this timing windows-wide.

[mho]

Filters :
- being able to use the drop down and when not selecting a new filter for it to go back to the one that was just on used rather than defaulting to blank as it does currently
- the ability to use filters in the search tab when using local search
- an inverse option to reverse the current filter, dont know if this is possible or not with regex
- custom age range for seaching rather than the predetermined values currently
- custom file size for min/max ranges

Agree with all of the above. Also, if there is room, it would be great to have two filter boxes (ANDing is probably enough, but OR/NOR/NAND might be nice, too:-)). If I have a "blue" filter and a "cars" filter, it would be nice to be able to get an easy search for blue cars. Sure, I can make a combined filter, but for more complex stuff it leads to a bunch of duplicate filter management.

- mho

[Bull]

-opening(expanding) a GoG in the group list not stalling/locking the complete program- sigh

I have this issue since using groups of groups in the Groups Tab, and have been having it since the group of groups feature.
I've gotten used to it.
When the GoG feature was released I gladly used it, and am using it in various ways. In some ways Newsbin used to crash.

At first I had a small amount of groups sorted in groups of groups, say 3-5 GoG's containing around ten groups.
When I unfolded/expanded a GoG a tiny delay happened until the GoG was expanded.

Adding/sorting more groups in the GoG made the delay a bit longer. The more groups added/sorted, the longer the delay. Not minutes, a couple of seconds. Even now with 3900+ groups sorted, the delay has not that much increased. Yet remains. And the effect it causes has basically remained the same ever since.

A delay that still today locks the program until the GoG is expanded. The program stalls/locks, whatever is downloading immediately locks also, without any issue (not at all first times), usually. Windows keeps the program in a temporary safeguarded mode until the GoG is opened. And Newsbin becomes responsive again. Just a lock of a couple of seconds.
Early on Newsbin crashed until Windows learned to temporarily stall the program.

I sent some crash reports to Microsoft the last couple of years for this particular issue, using Windows built-in error reporting. After the first couple of crash reports the stall came in. I have a notion it's a GUI/SQL thing.

Which still happens.
My nbi file currently is 768KB in size.

If I e.g. tick the close icon in the right above corner while an open GoG request has been issued, Newsbin will crash. Windows.
Patience sometimes is a virtue, sometimes.

Some family that also uses Newsbin does not use the GoG feature extensively as me because of this shall I say annoyance.

best regards,
B

[itimpi]

If I e.g. tick the close icon in the right above corner while an open GoG request has been issued, Newsbin will crash. Windows.

Nothing that Newsbin does should be capable of crashing Windows, although it could be acting as a trigger for an underlying fault on the system.

[sonomazr2]

I would like to see a feature I loved in BNR2, where you could pick the server to download from. Right click in either display or download tab and have a "download with" selection. An added benefit is if you see a group of files not available on the main server, you don't have to let go through all the files before it passes them onto the fill server. Just designate them to the fill.

Another case would be user has 2 servers, Charter and Easynews. Charter allows unlimited download but is capped at 2 connections at 32K per. Headers are downloaded from Easynews because they are compressed and they do not charge for headers. With this setup, header download can occur without interrupting articles. What can occur is the Charter connection can fall behind or user wants something faster than waiting for the Charter download. RIght-click, download with Easynews at your connection maximum.

[Bull]

(instead of doing a re-edit of my reply)

-the stalling/locking/hanging when fiddling in the Groups Tab-

I did not mention it also occurs when rearranging the sorting, effects are the same like I described.

Editing the nbi in e.g notepad, even better a fully portable text editor, of course has no delays & that always is a middle finger as to why that hanging occurs.

It's annoying and from knowing the experiences from people I know, it sort of stops users from further using some nifty features.

[Quade]

Bull, you're the only person in 5 years to report something like this. I'm constantly opening and closing my GOG's and I imagine others do too. The fact your PC crashes is really suspicious. As has been said, that shouldn't be possible. Simple rule of thumb that's 100% is, "newsbin crashes is a newsbin problem, windows crashes is a windows problem".

3900+:
-50-100 regularly ~ multiple times a week
-300+ occasionally
-the rest when digging around, latest Newsbin search is getting up to queryspeed so it is getting interesting to keep searches local; used newzbin, keeping binsearch because it's a superfast search which I'd like my local newsbin to become yet then I am sharing with Amsterdamned what I am looking for ~ privacy issue, advertisers, bots..

Here's part of your problem. 3900 groups. Maybe you're the only one to report it because you're the only one with 3900 subscribed groups. I can see this making it slow. Not crashing windows though. When you push the envelope, it's not surprising some things shake out. I've never tested with anywhere near that number of groups.

[philng]

can you bring back the way NBP 5.53 used to sort the posts by subject or at least add an option for it?
from 5.54 onward, NBP ignore any leading non-alpha character or space when sorting the headers by subject, and this makes many group very difficult to read and looking really messy.
I am still using the older version because of this.

[Quade]

Give me an example group to look at.

[phusion]

Hi:

A feature request for v6.
A "lockout poster and remove from download" option.
scenario: sometimes I randomly pick multiple downloads from a group.
I then discover that one on the downloads contains a virus/trojan.
Which means that the other downloads from that poster are also infected.
Would be great to lockout the poster and remove all download from that poster in one shot.
As opposed to tedious detective work in order to clean the download list.

thanks

[Maxdout38]

****************************************************************************************************************
Please consider when setting up directories to have Artist - Album. (Put spaces in between).
*****************************************************************************************************************

[DThor]

One of the problems with getting into save location philosophies like this is you'll get half a dozen people piping up with comments like ' nooo! Not spaces! Underscores! ' and 'nooo! Band name needs to come before... ' and on and on. Storage habits on disk are like religion to a lot of people. Really, what's needed is a customizable file sorting program, and it's unlikely Newsbin will double up to be that too in the near future.
I'm not speaking for the developers, though, just pointing out the nest of vipers that request contains.
At least now it's possible to break things out enough to make some sense of large download sets.

DT

[DaveXVI]

I have been asking for these two things forever, and they both seem like they would be very easy to implement.

1) Ability to search by group instead of by folder. Why do I have to make a new folder if I just want to search one group?

2) Ability to select the parts of autopar you want to use.
-- I like to use it for counting up the blocks that I download --- to my mind, that is so useful and so harmless that it should just be part of the main program --- whether there are pars or not, just total up the blocks/mb of each file downloaded.
-- It's sometimes handy to let it decode to the default folder when I tell it to, but ONLY when I tell it to. I don't want it decoding a 9GB DVD when I'm doing something else that requires a lot of CPU.
-- It is seldom good to let it automatically download extra PAR files, because it almost always downloads way more than needed, or downloads all available pars for a file that is obviously beyond repair.. If other people like that feature, great, but give us a switch so we can turn it off without turning off the other features.

IMO those two things are just about all that keeps Newsbin from being absolutely perfect.

Edit: A compromise I could live with, but which would be harder to program, is to allow the user to set a maximum amount of MB or blocks per file for automatically downloaded par files. So If Newsbin can fix a file by downloading 2MB, fine, but if it needs more than that, I want to look at it. It may be that the file is so hosed that it would take 200MB of pars to fix it, and in that case I'd rather just abandon the download than have Newsbin automatically download the 150MB the poster supplied and then not be able to do anything with them.

[feinbergfl]

Please include a shortcut for Download to Folder Named for Subject.

[dexter]

Please include a shortcut for Download to Folder Named for Subject.

In V6, shortcuts are user configurable. You can assign your own shortcut to this function.

[feinbergfl]

Very cool.

[Kraut2003]

It would be nice if the E-Mail notification could be configured to send out not 1 Mail every completed DL
but may be 1 digest Mail once a given time period lets say every 1h / 3h /6h / 1 Day etc.

If you do DL lots of files and use the notification your Mailbox tends to get spammed

I like the notification feature but it should be not 1 Mail with every completed DL

Greets

TS

[spg]

Ive been asking for this since v3, a proper, integreated, scheduled PAUSE/unpause when you have the limiter set to 0. please.... nzb schedule is just too flakey for me

[mho]

Falling prices for denser memory modules will soon make me go to 12GB and win7:-)

This got me thinking: Is there any reason for smaller downloads (say, <= 2GB) to ever hit disk until they are decoded? It might be interesting (if you have enough memory!) to have a mode where PAR checking and repair is all in-memory, and the unrar will be the only step to hit disk. It should be possible to allocate memory for a couple of sets (one downloading/checking/repairing and one unraring)

I don't know if this would be possible/easy within the architecture for 6, but if it can be done w/o much code changes, it might be worth investigating:-)

- mho

[mho]

An option to keep the timestamps from inside archives on decoded files.

- mho

[Quade]

This got me thinking: Is there any reason for smaller downloads (say, <= 2GB) to ever hit disk until they are decoded? It might be interesting (if you have enough memory!) to have a mode where PAR checking and repair is all in-memory, and the unrar will be the only step to hit disk. It should be possible to allocate memory for a couple of sets (one downloading/checking/repairing and one unraring)

The downside is that when it's finally time to write it all out, there's a good chance the volume of disk IO will overwhelm something else. I think it was 5.55 worked something like this in that it kept the files mostly in memory and then spit them out to disk. 50 meg files weren't too bad but, numerous people bitched about stuttering playback and games when the files sizes grew. Even 50 megs was too much for some machines. You're talking about keeping an entire set in memory and then writing out 2 gigs to disk.

Something worth trying would be to take 6 gigs and turn it into a ram disk, download to it, then unrar to the spinning disk. That ought to be really fast. In my tests with downloading to an SSD, it made a large difference at really high speeds. An SSD for the data drive ought to help 6 too.

[thirty2bit]

Newsbin noob here. I've got a couple of really minor things to toss out for consideration. First, have the "automatic update" of groups not fire off if any download is in progress - when it does fire, the updates take precedence over downloads. Any new tasks added to the Download list should be added last with group updates being lowest priority. Next, when looking at the properties of an AutoPAR set, highlight the rows/items that are missing blocks or are just missing altogether. Lastly, when changing the number of server connections, you can increase them on the fly, but if you decrease the count, NB doesn't release any connections.

Thanks for listening.

[richy99]

if you are using compressed headers and not downloading a billion headers from boneless the updates shouldnt take that long, are you on a slower connection for this to impact you?
autopar works completely different in v6
newsbin has to wait for the server to release the connection before it can remove it

[itimpi]

First, have the "automatic update" of groups not fire off if any download is in progress - when it does fire, the updates take precedence over downloads.

Most people prefer header downloads to happen ASAP which is why they are added at the top of the download list. Many people have hours/days of downloads queued and do not want to wait until they are finished before getting headers.

There is a 'trick' you can use to limit how many connections are used for header download described here in the Advanced section of the Newsbin User Guide.

[Ames]

Windows 7 Taskbar Integration would be awesome.

For example, showing the download status on the taskbar (the way IE, Firefox 4.x, and WinRar 4.x do). Think the hooks for this are pretty simple.

[mho]

and the unrar will be the only step to hit disk.

The downside is that when it's finally time to write it all out, there's a good chance the volume of disk IO will overwhelm something else.

Well, it would write exactly the same amount of data as a "normal" unrar, it just wouldn't be slowed down by reading at the same time. The total I/O should be less. If it's writing "too fast", maybe it could be artificially slowed down, somehow? :-)

- mho

[jeffxz]

Autopar:

Allow multiple decode paths and have it automatically select the correct one based on regular expression matching of the filename and/or group.

On the autopar screen, use a combobox for the decode path column so that you can quickly select one of the entered decode paths.

[richy99]

autopar is changing, how you know it now is compltely different in v6

[Mastermind]

I would like to have the posibility to make a 'Read Post Body' in the 'Failed Files'-Tab (if it exists in v6), because most of the files there, are not binaries (for me) and when you have a long download-list, it needs a lot of work to find these textfiles in a postlist to read it and this is a PITA.

[FrizzleFry]

In 5.5x you can create an NZB from the failed tab then load the NZB and Ctrl-R them from there.

I would be nice to Ctrl-R from the failed list directly though.

[Mastermind]

In 5.5x you can create an NZB from the failed tab then load the NZB and Ctrl-R them from there.

Thanks for the info, I've 'forgot' this option.

[mho]

Add search boxes to Files and Logging tabs (if they still exist in similar form:-))
A search for Groups tab and whatever replaces the AutoPAR tab (unless it's entirely folded into the Download tab that already has search) might be nice, too.

- mho

[richy99]

Add search boxes to Files and Logging tabs (if they still exist in similar form:-))
A search for Groups tab and whatever replaces the AutoPAR tab (unless it's entirely folded into the Download tab that already has search) might be nice, too.

- mho

autopar uses the download tab in a compact set so it is all done from here now, no more autopar tab
not sure about the logging tab search due to it holding 4000 entries and if you are getting lots of errors might flush out ones you want, probably a better option would be save to a txt file each session

[Quade]

Search boxes for some things has been on my mind too. Like finding a subscribed group in the groups list.

[wissertje]

I don´t know if it is already mention (if so my apologies), but maybe it is an idea when there is a new version available Newsbin shows a popup or message?
I now that there is (sometimes) a message in MOTD but maybe there is an other way, so it is more visible?

Allot of people never come to the forum of homepage and don't know if a update is available.

[dexter]

To implement that, Newsbin would have to "phone home" periodically. Many of our users are against that. We could make it an option but we primarily use the MOTD screen to announce new releases.

[wissertje]

To implement that, Newsbin would have to "phone home" periodically. Many of our users are against that. We could make it an option but we primarily use the MOTD screen to announce new releases.

Ah.. ok. I mention this because a few friends of my never know when there is a new update available. They disable the MOTD screen becourse it is annoying, so i tell them.

[Jean]

1. Being able to see what nb is doing and not doing in the process of download/verify/repair/extract. Which file is being worked on, any errors that prevent it from proceeding so I know it's time to do things by hand, etc. While I prefer newsbin above newsleecher, that last one has a much better way of showing this, with newsbin I often have to guess, I look at taskmanager to see if it's using cpu so I know it is doing something.
2. I have seen nb using/renaming par files to some some proprietary fileformats if I'm not mistaken, I couldn't use these to repair by hand and had to get par files anew. So please leave those files intact.

[DThor]

1. Yup, there's already better feedback in place for the check / repair / extraction process.

2. IIRC there's only two filename extensions being created in the download directory, and they're both necessary. They aren't proprietary formats at all, just a temporary naming scheme to ensure files don't stomp on top of one another. One is for the actual file as it's being downloaded, the other adds an extension to files that are being repaired.

DT

[Jean]

1. Yup, there's already better feedback in place for the check / repair / extraction process.

Good to know.

the other adds an extension to files that are being repaired.

Yes but this can result in a situation where you can't repair by hand anymore, or rename all those files by hand first, at least that's what I think I experienced.

[Quade]

In Quickpar, you simply manually load up these other files. You can even load up the NB2 files in Quickpar. It'll extract the valid blocks from any file type.

It's the "Add" button middle right of the display in Quickpar.

[Jean]

Ow yes of course. Thanks.
I would like it better if the files kept their names but this will do.

[richy99]

Ow yes of course. Thanks.
I would like it better if the files kept their names but this will do.

if the file is incomplete then you can use the assemble incompletees option and it should give it the correct name, if they are failing to be renamed even with this then something is blocking that prcess, the files get put on the disk as temp nb! files the renamed upon completion

[Jean]

Will try that next time. Thanks again.

if the file is incomplete then you can use the assemble incompletees option and it should give it the correct name, if they are failing to be renamed even with this then something is blocking that prcess, the files get put on the disk as temp nb! files the renamed upon completion