The masses need to pick a new site to invest their energies in, rather than scatter at random to lots of different sites! Any particular one out there that's better than the rest?
Here's a breakdown of one NZB, for a single 3.88GB file.
Inside are 74 RAR files, and 15 additional PAR files containing parity for recovering corrupted data.
Each of these 89 files is split into 37 parts of 1.4MB for ~3200 pieces total.
These pieces are then encoded with yENC (similar to base64) and then uploaded to the newsgroup.
Every single one of these yENC pieces is referenced in the NZB file, making for a total of 400KB. Just because of this, the NZB indexs are enormous; hundreds of gigabytes, probably terabytes in some cases.
> downloading billions of headers to try and find a
> particular NZB is a mammoth task
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotnet
The searchable information (and comments and such) is distributed through Usenet itself.
In my short few weeks of using it, the API seems better than nzbmatrix, but the community / comments on files is near nonexistent. If you're only looking for something to hook up to sickbeard / couchpotato though, it should do the job just fine.