What is Bommanews?

Bommanews a.k.a b-news was, in January of '01, the original development title of a newsreading (or rather not) program. It has its roots - development and beta testing - among the users of a Belgian ISP called Telenet (aka Pandora), and Pandora's original logo was a grandma, affectionately nicknamed "bomma" in Flemish, hence the name.

Why B-news?

B-News (or bommanews) was developed to lift the weight of the overhead inherent to UUEncode and Base64 encoding: it uses a new encoding method to stuff binary data in text messages. This method eats more CPU resources, but it manages to lower the loss from approximately 40% for UUEncode to 3.5% (the decimal point between those digits is not dirt on your monitor), while still avoiding the use of ANSI control codes in the message body.

For the rest, B-News (the application) is very limited in functionality: it was designed primarily to post files to a Usenet server, and download files that were posted in its own format from there again. A stand-alone decoder was also developed to allow downloading with classic newsreaders, and for Mac and Linux users someone else created an encoder and decoder too.

Who developed B-news?

B-news was developed by Luc Van der Veken. More information about the original Bommanews can be found at the sourceforge site.

What is Bommanews GU?

Bommanews GU is an extension of the original Bommanews. It was created by Guest Unknown who added most of the externally visible features currently available. His site can be found here. Bommanews GU was still missing one important feature, the auto resume of broken downloads. So i took over the work of Zjappa (Guest Unknown ) added some extra features and merged this with B-news BM  ( which was another add-on to B-news GU by BMaster). 

Since then I have been constantly adding features. Most of the features lay deep in the bowels of Bommanews. An overview of these features can be found on the New Functions page.

So why suddenly Bommanews Plus?

Bommanews Plus is the new name I will be using for Bommanews GU. I decided to do this because users would get confused looking for the new version of bommanews which has yEnc support. Is it version B-news GU 0.1.5 build 52 or B-news GU 0.1.6 build 57 for yEnc? Also I find the plus very appropriate.
So to keep it simple : Bommanews Plus is the version of B-news that has yEnc support.

What is yEnc?

What is yEnc you might ask. yEnc is a new encoding method which offers efficient and proper transmission for binaries on the Usenet (or by email and other applications). It is similar to the BN-encoding used by the original Bommanews. But yEnc is (becoming) the de facto standard for encoding binaries on Usenet.

Why yEnc?

Why did I added yEnc support to B-news? Initially I had no intension whatsoever to support the yEnc encoding. This was mainly due to personal reasons, I don't like the yEnc encoding for many reasons (like other people). But since it is the de facto standard I added yEnc support to Bommanews. This way you can use both encodings within a single tool.

Credits

Most of the credits for Bommanews Plus go to Vlad ( a.k.a. Luc Van der Veken), if it wasn't for him there wouldn't be a B-news not to mention B-news GU or Plus. Also a lot of credit goes to Zjappa for his great hacking work on B-news. 

Don Corleone

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