Software Update: NewsLeecher 4.0 Beta 8

The eighth beta release of NewsLeecher 4.0 was released on Friday. With this program it is possible to download files from newsgroups in a simple way. NewsLeecher has support for nzb files, has a so-called ‘super search’, and can automatically check downloaded files for integrity and completeness and then extract them independently. In version 4.0, support for threads has been added and adjustments have been made to handle the increased retention of super search, which is now 370 days. In this eighth beta release, support for native header compression has also been added. If the server supports this, header retrieval can be accelerated by up to a factor of ten. The full changelog of this release looks like this:

New features:

• Native Header Compression:
  Native article header compression now supported through the usenet server ‘XFEATURE’ command. The feature can be turned off from: “Settings -> Adv. Nerdy Tweaks -> Article Download Allow XFEAT Compression”. Not all usenet servers support this command. NewsLeecher will automatically check for support when it connects to the server, and use the feature if supported. When the feature is enabled, the ‘header download’ speed should be 2-10X times faster than usual.
• Implemented physical disk cleanup for usenet group caches. It’s possible to specify how much garbage a group cache must have before the cleanup routine is triggered. The setting can be accessed at: Settings -> Adv. Nerdy Tweaks -> Article Cache Max Garbage Pct
• (Re)implemented the ‘Add to Subject Ignore List’ feature for the group headers view. It can be accessed from the popup menu.
• (Re)implemented the ‘Add to Poster Ignore List’ feature for the group headers view. It can be accessed from the popup menu.
• (Re)implemented the ‘Select Smart’ feature for the group browsing view, the SuperSearch Service view and the transfer queue. The comparison algorithm used by ‘Select Smart’ has also been improved a bit.
• (Re)implemented the ‘Select Poster’ feature for the group browsing view, the SuperSearch Service view and the transfer queue.
• (Re)implemented the ‘Export to NZB’ feature for the SuperSearch view.
• It’s now possible to post text replies to articles, directly from the SuperSearch view.
• All leech methods available in the group article browsing view, are now also available in the SuperSearch view. Including all the ‘special leech’ commands.

Improved features:

• The overall performance of NewsLeecher has been improved a lot due to internal optimizations.
• Group article headers are now received in a separate CPU thread. Using this multithreaded approach to fecth headers, will make NewsLeecher run smoother on slower computer, while fetching headers.
• When ‘Opening’ a selected article collection, NewsLeecher will now only open *.NFO article files within the collection, instead of the entire collection.
• The progress bar view in the “Bots” listview, now also shows the download progress of the entire collections belonging to the downloading articles.
• The “Number of New Group Headers at Server” counters are now updated live, while fetching headers from groups.
• Several optimizations to the internal structures in NewsLeecher, making the app run a bit smoother on slow systems.
• Moved Socks Firewall setup to the Advanced Nerdy Tweaks settings page.
• Improved the appearance of the Nerdy Tweaks dialog a bit.
• Narrower visual improvements here and there.

Fixed bugs:

• The explorer listviews sort column and sort order is now remembered between sessions.
• Fixed bug where articles added to the top of the transfer queue were sometimes reversed in order.
• Fixed bug where the queue status text for downloading articles was sometimes incorrectly set to ‘initializing’.
• In the previous betas, the columns in the “all groups” listview were not sortable. Fixed.
• News Leecher would sometimes freeze for some seconds during starup. This has (most probably 😉 been fixed. Not 100% sure though.
• When exporting articles to an NZB file, the article poster names were sometimes skipped. This has been fixed.
• Sorting by the ‘Download Folder’ column in the queue listview didn’t work properly. Fixed.
• Smaller bugs fixed. (the adv. nerdy tweak ‘gui_show_popup_hints’ didn’t work in the previous beta, etc..)