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Comment by taotau | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally, i bought myself a Synology NAS this weekend with the honest intention of using it mainly as a backup device, but while browsing the built in apps, i noticed a lot of the media download and streaming apps mentioned BT and NZB... took me a couple of seconds to realize what NZB referred to, but Im not really surprised that NZB has become an active protocol again, given how many consumer services make you jump through hoops to use BT.

I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.

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> I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day. I recall spending quite a bit of time filtering out a lot of the binary groups.

There was a very nice, easy-to-use NNTP server that was intended for small sites with few users, called leafnode. It is in a mature but still-maintained state. https://www.leafnode.org/status.shtml

I ran it on a laptop so I could slurp up my newsgroups and read them on the train with tin.

> I ran a local NNTP relay on my home phone back in the day.

Another thing that was sometimes done for BBSes was setting yourself up as a 'point node':

> As the number of messages in Echomail grew over time, it became very difficult for users to keep up with the volume while logged into their local BBS. Points were introduced to address this, allowing technically-savvy users to receive the already compressed and batched Echomail (and Netmail) and read it locally on their own machines.[23]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Points

This was obviated a bit with the creation of offline news readers (e.g., BlueWave):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)

The equivalent to QWK for Usenet were SOUP files:

* https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Simple_Offline_USENET_Packet_Fo...

* http://www.faqs.org/faqs/off-line-readers/usenet/intro/

I have many fond memories of being a Point and running the Binkly Mailer.

It's all been downhill since then

I get NZB but BT?

BitTorrent I assume.

in context it appears to mean BitTorrent

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