About

Database Content

• Total NNTP or other News Servers: 63 (see list of active newsgroup servers)
• Total Newsgroups: 2,118
• Threads: 1,867,488
• Authors: 471,304
• Articles: 8,100,648
• First Article: 08-May-1997
• Last Article: 02-Mar-2022
• Article Database Size: more than 17GB
• Rubicon Index Size: 12,025,726 words indexed
• Data imported prior to 10-Dec-2011 was imported in Ansi. Now data is processed using UTF-8. Over time, we hope to re-import some old articles.

Database Storage

• Article database: Firebird SQL 2.5.9 locally on the same Windows server, on AWS EC2. As of 2-Jun-2014, the Firebird SQL pagesize is 8192 per excellent advice from IBAnalyst.
• Keyword index: NexusDB v4.0 64-bit
• Charset: UTF8. Try searching for ΠΉΔΗΣΕ or русски to be convinced that we are indexing more than just English here.

WWW Software

• codenewsfast.com
• OS: Microsoft Win2019 Server, 64-bit
• HTTP Server: Microsoft IIS
• FREE HTTPS Certificate: LetsEncrypt.org
• Configuration: XML via ZaphodsMap
• Web Application v1.0.0.0 [6936]
  • WebHub-v3.284 for d28_win64
  • Searches executed by Rubicon v4.072
  • Text database access by IBObjects v5.x
  • Index database access by NexusDB 64-bit
  • Multi-threading by OmniThreadLibrary
• XanaNews is used to download over NNTP as of June 2020. A custom program reads the XanaNews DAT files and adjusts to charset UTF-8 as needed.
• Article importer written by Tamarack Associates; updated by HREF Tools
  • Embarcadero Delphi d28_win64
  • Rubicon v4.072
  • IBObjects v5.x
• Indexing subsystem
  • Rubicon v4.072
  • NexusDB v4.0 compiled with Delphi d28_win64

Hardware

• Web Server: AWS EC2 t2.xlarge
• Bandwidth: AWS "moderate"

NNTP Client

• Many long-term Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero developers use XanaNews to download and read newsgroups. XanaNews was written in Delphi and full source is available. Another option is to use Mozilla Thunderbird to work with NNTP.
• For a complete list of Network News Transfer Protocol clients, see wikipedia on Usenet_clients

Artistic Design

• Original design by Deven Hickingbotham at Tamarack Associates in California.
• Blue design in 2010 was by Ran Zhang when she worked at HREF Tools Corp.
• Responsive design by Zurb Foundation v6 as of July 2020
• Experimented with dual color scheme options in July 2012 thanks to Color Scheme Designer; settled on a single dark palette in July 2020 with assistance from Elizabeth Kent.
• HTML5 compliance helped by validator.w3.org

Database Design / Tools

• DeZign for Databases used to study and then improve the Firebird SQL schema.
• Full Convert by SpectralCore used to convert databases for testing and optimization.

About You

• User agent: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
• Remote IP: 18.222.164.176
• Considered to be a web robot: no

Sponsorship

• HREF Tools Corp. currently pays all costs associated with this site.
• If you would like to sponsor the site for a month, by all means, volunteer by contacting HREF Tools Corp. There are always interesting Delphi programming tasks on the to-do list, and there are ongoing expenses.
• HREF Tools recommends ServiceObjects.com for real time email verification.