As neither public nor easily-accessible private torrent trackers are actively seeding some of the releases on my list, I was wondering if usenet may have at least some of them. Before getting usenet indexer and provider subscriptions, however, I had several questions:

  1. Is there a means to browse usenet content availability prior to subscribing to an indexing service as a means of determining whether or not enough releases from my list are available to make the effort worthwhile?

  2. What is the optimal combination of usenet indexer/provider services and how worthwhile would waiting until Black Friday to get either service be?

Edit: Did a bit more research, deciding on Frugal Usenet as an initial usenet provider, NZBGet as a download client, and sourcing NZBs from NZB Finder after finding that it had more releases from my list than NZBPlanet or NZBGeek. Still haven’t found most of the remaining releases from my list, however, so if there are better usenet providers or indexers than the ones I’ve tried so far, I’d be glad to try them!

Edit 2: In trying to figure out why my usenet files were getting stuck at 0.71 MB I decided to add a NewsDemon block account to the mix (with the well-hidden reddit50 code seemingly cutting the cost of any such plan in half). Don’t think it made a difference, as the files ended up being repaired and extracted by NZBGet after a subsequent refresh, but hopefully the extra provider will come in useful with rarer releases, if I can find anything else.

Thanks for the help!