Download NewsLeecher 3.5 beta 1

With the NewsLeecher program you can read messages from newsgroups on Usenet and download files. Among other things, it can download files from multiple servers at the same time and has on-board support for uuEncode and yEnc encoding as well as the NZB file format. The first beta version of NewsLeecher 3.5 has recently been released with the following changes:

Version 3.5beta 1:

• The v3.5 series of NewsLeecher uses a new article cache system, which *isn’t* compatible with earlier versions of NewsLeecher. The cache is automatically upgraded when used with NewsLeecher v3.5, and will not work with earlier versions after the cache upgrade. It you still want to use an earlier version of NewsLeecher, it is recommended that you make a clean-install for NewsLeecher v3.5.
• The XPAT feature is not yet hooked up in this release.
• *BIG ADDITION*: NewsLeecher will now use separate threads for saving article data to disk. This means that NewsLeecher wont ‘freeze’ while saving downloaded files to disk. The newly implemented thread architecture is made in an easy-to-expand way, so, if needed, more code will probably be multi-threaded in the future.
• NewsLeecher will now treat downloaded article parts as failed if it discovers part CRC and/or filesize errors. The error checking can be turned on/off from the setup dialog.
• New and easy way to see if downloaded files are incomplete: When NewsLeecher has downloaded an incomplete article, it will now convert the filename associated with the article to ‘UPPERCASE’ before saving the file to disk. This makes it easy to see that the downloaded file might need to be repaired or deleted.
• Added an ‘extreme debugging log’ option which will log all server input/output. The option can be accessed from the advanced setup sheet. It is highly recommended to keep this option turned off under normal circumstances.
• New ‘Download small articles first’ feature. If enabled, small articles (small is user definable) will be moved to the top of the transfer queue when a ‘leech’ command is initiated. Feature can be accessed from: Options -> Download.
• In addition to the new ‘download small articles first’ feature, a new button, called ‘small to top’, has been added to the download manager toolbar. If pressed, *all* small articles in the transfer queue will be moved the top of the queue.
• NewsLeecher will now ask if articles should be sorted, when the user clicks one of the download queues header columns.
• Added option to show text in the listviews in all-lowercase. Saves screen real estate. Can be accessed from options.
• Added a right-click popup menu to the page tab sheets that makes it easy to open/close specific tab pages.
• Added possibility to ‘Close NewsLeecher’ when the transfer queue is empty.
• When browsing a (virtual) group, the groupname associated with first selected article in the group listview, will now be written in ‘italic’ in the group overview. This makes it easier to see what group a specific article belongs to. Good when browsing multiple text groups for example.
• *BIG IMPROVEMENT*: Totally rewritten socket communication system. The new system is written from scratch to give more control over the socket communication and should be a bit faster than the old system used.
• Updated the NewsLeecher cache to support 64bit pointers. In prior versions, *very* large groups might get corrupted, due to the limit of 32bit integers used by the cache format. The old cache format will be updated on-the-fly, so it will not be necessary to re-download headers. Note than when the cache has been updated, it cannot be used by NewsLeecher versions prior to v3.5 beta 1.
• NewsLeecher now has support for future SuperSearch clustered servers. Clustering SuperSearch makes it possible to further increase index retention, improve the search capabilities, index more groups, etc.
• NewsLeecher is now able to use SuperSearch without having to load the ‘news’ page first. This is done by saving SuperSearch login data between sessions.
• Improved maneuvering when deleting / marking-as-old articles in the NewsLeecher listviews.
• Hint descriptions in the NewsLeecher menus.
• Improved logging when downloading files. Easier log overview and more detailed information.
• Server Msgr. Listview now shows the server specific retention.
• Redesigned the Server Setup dialog.
• The tabs have been relocated in NewsLeecher. The ‘More’ tab is gone and all its subtabs are moved to the mainscreen page control. Unused tabs can be turned off from the main menu or by clicking the ‘X’ close buttons next to tab pages. Note that the ‘Xpat’ / ‘Posting Queue’ tabs are turned-off by default.
• Cache save improvement: NewsLeecher will now only save group cache to disk if the cache has been changed since it was loaded.
• Lots of visual tweaks. NewsLeecher now looks a bit better when used in various Windows theme modes.
• Visual improvement: Added a new ‘Aluminum’ toolbar theme.
• Visual improvement: Changed checkbox looks in listviews.
• NewsLeecher will now wait 3 seconds before reconnecting a bot, if it has just disconnected. This will prevent some of the “Too Many Connections” error messages that some users receive.
• Image thumbnails are now generated in a separate program thread to avoid program freezes.
• New page control used in the NewsLeecher main screen. Improves flexibility and looks.
• Uses new and better method to find out if articles should be marked as ‘downloaded’. The new method is not compatible with the old one, so previously downloaded articles will not be marked as ‘downloaded’ anymore.
• Moved some ‘global listview’ options to the ‘Listview Misc. 2’ options dialog sheet.
• Upgraded compiler, which has resulted in a major decrease of used system GDI objects. (from 3500+ to around 900)
• Many small improvements. Visual and non visual.
• Fixed bug where the ‘new version’ notification window would be shown multiple times when the ‘news’ page was reloaded.
• On the Usenet Manager tab, sorting by ‘New (S)’ now works.
• Fixed bug where NewsLeecher would repeatedly try to connect to servers without delay between the attempts.
• NewsLeecher had some non-serious graphical bugs when working in Windows non-classic theme mode. These are fixed.
• Unloading groups resulted in a program bug if one or more groups were actively updating. Fixed!
• The ‘never auto-reconnect’ option was sometimes ignored. Fixed!
• Sometimes NewsLeecher returned what seemed like a server response, when it couldn’t get in touch with a server. This has been changed to avoid any confusion.
• Various minor bug fixes.