Seriously.

The culmination of about 4 years procrastinating is upon us. Watchdog on V3 is now operational (not Daily Summary yet, sadly, we'll get that done in about.. umm... another 6 years).

It has been *completely* rewritten and bears *no* resemblence to v2 Watchdog, on either the frontend or the backend. There is no longer a page of Watchdog forms - you now use Saved Searches to maintain it. Hopefully you've all been playing around with Saved Searches for long enough, so starting to use Watchdog on v3 is pretty much just ticking a box on your Saved Searches summary page.

Since there were tens of thousands of Searches that had Watchdog enabled over the last 4 years, we've turned them all off as most of you probably don't want spamming with them all. If you wanted any of them turned on, please go back and do it. You should start getting mails within 20 minutes.

Full documentation can be found on the wiki.


Happy April Fools Day! :)

Further to the previous news item, the attribute search queries now work in the main search box, which includes both the quicksearch box at the top of every page, and the advanced search form.

This now supersedes the previous news item, so the "Advanced Attribute Options" box on advanced search will soon disappear. If you have any Saved Searches using it, move the contents of this box into the normal search box and it should continue to work as expected.

Those of you who have wanted more advanced attribute filtering options, wait no more - we have just added a new preference, 'Attribute Searching', which brings the complete power of boolean matching to attributes on reports.

For complete information, see the wiki page.

To enable it, you need to set the preference 'Attribute Searching' to 'Textbox' (or Both), which can be found right at the bottom of Lite Preferences (in Advanced) or at the bottom of the General section in v3 Full prefs. You will see a new textbox towards the bottom of the Advanced Search form which replaces all the Attribute selection boxes.
You can then specify options like "Attr:Lang~English" to get English reports. (wiki page explains this).

This is a fairly advanced option so if you're happy with how current searching works, ignore this entire news item. If you find yourself wanting boolean abilities on attribute matching, check it out.

It's also pretty early in development so if it doesn't work, let us know - and let us know how it could be improved.

Also a quick Lite update: the response is mostly positive, so it is staying. Those who are complaining they don't like it, the solution is simple - don't use it. It's not going to replace v3 Full, it is and always was an alternative. We're gradually converting more pages so it'll become more useful over the coming weeks. Themes will probably be added in a couple of months.

We are now trialling a new 'Lite Mode' on v3. In your View Mode panel on the left-hand-side you will see an 'Enable Lite' button to turn it on/off.

This is still very early days and so only a few pages have been converted (the most important ones, we feel). Any comments saying "so-and-so page doesn't work in Lite Mode" WILL BE DELETED WITHOUT NOTICE.
For information on which pages are done, see the wiki page Newzbin:Lite_Mode.

We need your (constructive) feedback on how this should progress. By it's very nature, Lite Mode is supposed to be .. lite, so don't ask for every single v3 feature to be ported over; that's not how it's going to work. The most important features are being carried over, in particular we're aiming to make it more like v2 than v3.

What we need to know is - is Lite Mode worth the trouble? Does anyone like it? And if so, which pages should we convert next in order of importance.

File listings (the raw usenet view) on v2 have been disabled.

This is mainly because generating them uses an old system which is quite slow, and basically drains resources. It's not worth the effort to port it over to the new system, and keeping it active on the old system is causing us some capacity issues.

File browsing has been completely revamped on v3 and is much faster. If you haven't already, check it out.

Report listings will of course remain on v2 until it is killed off. Which should be sometime this year, honest.

Those of you who have been subscribers since we introduced premium membership nearly half a decade ago will recall that the price has remained more or less unchanged from it's current value of £0.25 per week.

Regrettably the time has come that we have to pass on rises in line with inflation. From January 25th at 00:00GMT, we will be effecting an increase of £0.05 per week - the new weekly rate will be £0.30 sterling (this is broadly in line with a 4% increase year-on-year).

Up-to-date exchange rates are available from http://www.xe.com. As a rule of thumb you can roughly double the rates to convert to US dollars (so about 60 cents a week now, up from about 50c).

You may have noticed that there is now a system to invite new members to Newzbin on your v3 account homepage. We are planning to implement a reward scheme based around these invites, which will most likely be free credit in proportion to the amount of active users you invite. More details on this as we finalise them in the next couple of months - but you can start inviting now if you like, they'll all count.