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 [7044]
- 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
- 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
About You
- User agent: CCBot/2.0 (https://commoncrawl.org/faq/)
- Remote IP: 18.97.9.172
- Considered to be a web robot: yes
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.