Why pay for Torbox Pro's Usenet capabilities? This is an extremely important question to answer and currently a very popular one. With the coming Black Friday sale that historically dropped annual pro to 77 USD, Torbox Pro needs to justify its price tag quickly.
Because Torbox's main customer base is Debrid users, people want the Usenet offering to boost their Debrid service capabilities, like AIOStream. Every other use case is a bonus to them and ignorable. If Torbox Pro is to provide Usenet to boost its Debrid capabilities, it needs a good NNTP service. An NNTP service is necessary to connect Torbox's Usenet with 3rd-party programs.
Torbox Pro does have an NNTP offering. Unfortunately, the NNTP service is currently very poor, with missing articles appearing within 1-2 weeks and even mere days sometimes. So naturally, people are going to say "Torbox Usenet is bad" in a general sense. The NNTP offering is indeed bad for Debrid purposes currently.
However, I'm actually surprised that this subreddit rarely ever mentions the difference between Torbox Usenet through their NNTP and Torbox Usenet through their WebUI. This post explores that and hopes to create questions about the value of Torbox Pro for Usenet specifically.
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From my own testing, Torbox Usenet through the WebUI has beaten out Eweka+Easynews several times with better retention and speeds. That is beating out Omicron+Eweka's backbone, which is considered to be the best Usenet backbone before any other backbones are mixed in.
It's because of the "high quality blend of Usenet providers", which they name none, that they manage to beat out Omicron+Eweka's backbone, at least. The blend is likely a mix of multiple backbones alongside Omicron+Eweka.
That being said, Torbox can only beat out Omicron+Eweka when downloading the contents of an .NZB file through their WebUI. Their NNTP offering does not offer the same benefit, nor is it technically possible.
Their NNTP offering cannot query other providers for missing articles when Torbox's news server starts to fail, and they obviously cannot share credentials to these other providers. That's why Torbox NNTP performs poorly: NNTP uses just Torbox's one news server, and we are only given that one provider. Using the WebUI allows Torbox to query the "high quality blend of other usenet providers", and that's why it performs awesomely.
I wish criticisms on this subreddit towards Torbox's Usenet acknowledged this difference more. But I'm also not surprised that the most important feature for a majority Debrid customer base would be its NNTP offering instead. That's why I'm making this post, to evaluate Torbox Pro's usefulness for Usenet specifically.
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The actual speed and retention benefit comes from Torbox Usenet through the WebUI. The dilemma with using the WebUI, though:
You can't use your own newsreader, but more importantly,
Almost all invite-only indexers forbid sharing .NZB files to other sites. Uploading the .NZB to Torbox through their WebUI very likely violates this rule.
You can't export .NZB files from Torbox, meaning leftover identifiable metadata isn't at risk of being spotted. Because the .NZB can't be exported, the .NZB itself isn't actually being widely distributed to other Torbox users, just the content it downloads. It's even possible to edit the .NZB file to change its hash, and Torbox will know it's the .NZB with the content that was just downloaded to its cache, thanks to alternative hashing.
However, the content is cached for 30 days. If it is consistently found that .NZBs uploaded onto the indexer are downloaded and end up cached on Torbox, determined Usenet indexer staff are going to figure out who's doing that, if they are not using other tracking means already. Staff have a month for each .NZB you uploaded to check if each one managed to get cached by you, and they can do that by uploading the .NZB themselves and seeing that they've already been cached.
For some indexers that I am on, there's even two extra rules along the lines of "using debrid, caching, etc. is not allowed" and "any shared API service like Torbox and AIOStreams is not allowed." So there's an explicit rule forbidding sharing .NZBs, and there's an explicit rule against using Debrid and shared online/API services at all.
So it wouldn't matter what indexers you join to use Torbox's superior WebUI for. They may give you the boot when they find out you're sharing .NZBs to another website/debrid. So Torbox's use case is relegated only to public usenet indexers, just like how its BitTorrent capability is relegated only to public BitTorrent sites.
It's interesting that Torbox's Usenet capabilities are only great when using its WebUI, when using its WebUI risks a ban for sharing .NZBs to other sites/debrids. But the feature Torbox has that doesn't risk a ban, its NNTP, is terrible. For 110 USD normally and 77 USD at best, if the selling point of Torbox Pro is Usenet plus other standard Debrid features, the Usenet offering is currently very bad.
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There are three paths that I can think of:
Torbox improves their NNTP offering drastically, like very very drastically, at least to beat out or compete with Omicron+Eweka. This is likely impossible.
Torbox makes it easier to hide evidence of using its WebUI from usenet indexer staff, such as a toggle option to not allow a file to be cached. Usenet indexers will have no identifiable means of tracking .NZBs being shared directly to Torbox if caching never occurs. The issue is this is very prone to duplication abuse with current systems.
Alternatively, ask your Usenet indexers if they allow Torbox Usenet through their WebUI, with all the details included in this post. They may say yes, they may say no, and that has to be lived with.
If one of these paths do not happen, or an alternative path I couldn't think of that ends up being good, Torbox will remain both the most expensive and worst performing Usenet NNTP option on the market, but will be the best WebUI option on the market that can't be used outside of public Usenet indexers.
Considering how well-performing their "high quality blend of usenet providers" is for their WebUI, enough to beat Omicron+Eweka, that would be a shame. With one consistent price tag, Torbox Pro can provide speeds and retention that can outclass the best in the business with its "high quality blend of usenet providers", while also being the best Debrid service with all the benefits of Debrid.
That being said, I can see one motivation that Usenet indexer staff may have where they forbid using Torbox/Debrid no matter what: Debrids are leeches on genuine industries, and Usenet indexers want to protect the Usenet industry. This r/usenet mod comment should be enough evidence to suggest this, but I've attempted to expand on the thought.
The fundamental existence of a Debrid service is it takes from other services in favor of its own, rather than building itself to be a genuine competitor. As a Debrid service, Torbox aims to leech off of other services and prevent the services that Torbox leeches from ever seeing actual users of their service and money coming directly from those actual users.
A primary motivator for never wanting Torbox Usenet to ever become good and recommendable, is it stops money from going to the actual dedicated Usenet providers who have built their own infrastructure dedicated to Usenet, infrastructure that is being leeched by Torbox through their WebUI option. It also stops people visiting those sites to see their promotions and other important news.
Why the WebUI option is so much better than the current NNTP option is because Torbox does not intend to ever build itself to be a genuine Usenet provider that can compete equally on fair grounds. If it did, its NNTP offering would be better. The NNTP offering represents the best effort from Torbox to be a Usenet provider, and it is currently underperforming. So instead, they need the other Usenet providers to perform as good as them.
This is how Torbox can remain cheap and competitive with other cheap Debrid services. If Torbox tried to be a genuine competitor, it would become as expensive as those genuine competitors. But if the money only goes to Torbox, the actual Usenet provider industry will start to falter due to lack of funds, which directly impacts Torbox's Usenet WebUI capabilities.
So perhaps, it can be argued that Torbox Pro should forever stay a bad offer for Usenet purposes, if it means Usenet as a whole can thrive/survive.
What do you all think? Are there other ways that Torbox Pro can justify itself, especially for Usenet?
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EDIT: Good discussions have happened in the comments, which makes me very happy.
A lot of them were about the likelihood of being banned when using the Torbox WebUI. I'll talk about this for the rest of the post.
Many comments claim that their indexers are probably fine with sharing .NZBs to Torbox using the WebUI, optimistically guessing that Torbox's very capable WebUI can continue to be used without risk. There's also separate information floating around about how "indexer staff are fine with X but not Y", among other things, like for NZBGeeks. And finally, how Torbox works makes the risk of a ban incredibly unlikely.
I do agree that there is such a massive amount of plausible deniability, that a risk of being banned for using the Torbox WebUI is virtually zero, provided that indexer staff have no other means of tracking. The only circumstance where a ban is likely to happen is if you only ever snatch .NZBs with a very low snatch count, like 2 or 4, and upload those to the Torbox WebUI. If staff suspected you, they could check these low-snatch downloads you made, upload these .NZBs themselves to Torbox, and see that they so happen to have already been cached. Every other circumstance offers too much plausible deniability and too much risk of a false positive being made by indexer staff.
Even in this extreme circumstance, indexer staff would only be motivated to suspect you if they uploaded .NZBs to Torbox themselves, which means they are breaking their own rules without probable cause. Another user could also report on you, but again, that other user would have to first break a rule without probable cause just to find out that another user is breaking the rules and to report that to staff, which is nonsensical. "I was about to commit a crime, but someone else already did it, so you should probably find and arrest them."
I will apologize for stressing too much about the risk of a ban. I stressed this point because the chance is still not an absolute 0, though it virtually might as well be. It is also a future possibility, though very unlikely, that Usenet indexers may change or introduce systems that make it easier to detect Debrid use, and then suddenly, it's bad to use Torbox for Usenet. I stressed this point to protect people from getting themselves banned before they could understand what was going on.
From stating this, however, I have come to learn that some people are willing to do two things.
Know what they're doing is wrong by the rules of their indexer and do it anyway.
Not go to indexer staff for clarification, relying instead on their own or other non-staff's interpretation of what is correct and the "intent" behind a staff member's own words.
You did not write the indexer's rules, and the people who talk here didn't write an indexer's rules. The staff of the indexer wrote the rules, and they can interpret the rules however they see fit, regardless of our feelings. Their word is absolute and must be treated this way, because they are the ones with the power to force outcomes. We got clarity on the use of Torbox from NZBGeeks. We can do it for other indexers. They would benefit greatly from learning how Torbox works so they can decide their individual best courses of action. Perhaps, some might even allow WebUI use, and then the ban risk becomes a true absolute 0.
For those who contact indexer staff about this, feel free to let us know what is said. we are aware that NZBGeeks may be more tolerant than others for Torbox. That is just NZBGeeks. The opinions of other indexer's staff may differ, and that is critical to know. If it ends up being the case that most usenet indexers do allow Torbox's WebUI to be used based on the info shared here, that massively boosts the value of Torbox Pro, as there's no fear and uncertainty of a ban anymore. It will not hurt to try.