Set up UsenetShare

About five minutes. Three things need to be in place, and the app tracks them for you on one screen.

Open Settings (the gear, top right) and stay on the Overview tab. It shows three cards — Identity, License, Usenet account — and says it plainly:

Your setup at a glance — identity, license, and Usenet account. Get these three green and you are ready to upload, download, and share.

Work through them in this order. Identity is usually already done.

1. Identity — normally nothing to do

Your identity is a cryptographic key pair created automatically the first time the app starts. It is how you prove you own the folders you publish, and how someone authorises you on a private share.

Check the Identity card reads ready. If it does, move on.

If it says it has not been created, go to Settings → Identity and press Create identity.

One thing to know now, so it is not a surprise later. The Identity tab holds Your Identity Token with a 📋 Copy button. That token is what you send to someone who wants to give you access to a private share — it is your public address, safe to share, and it is not a secret. You will need it the first time somebody publishes a private share to you.

2. License — required, no trial

Go to Settings → License, paste your key into License key, and press Activate.

There is no trial period. Without an active license the app installs, runs and lets you look around, but publishing, importing, downloading and writing to disk are all refused. If you try, you get a clear message rather than a mysterious failure.

Three tiers are offered — 1 Year, 3 Years and Lifetime — with current pricing shown on that tab and a Buy a license button.

A license is tied to one computer. Moving to a new machine is supported and takes one click on each end: Deactivate (move to another machine) here, then Move license to this computer there. See Update, move machine, uninstall.

It rechecks periodically online, and tolerates being offline. A few days without a connection is fine — it keeps working from the last successful check. You do not need to be online continuously.

3. Usenet account — the one that matters

Go to Settings → Connection.

If you use Newshosting or Tweaknews, press Use Newshosting or Use Tweaknews to fill in the host, port and TLS for you. Otherwise enter your provider's details by hand — they will be on their website under NNTP or newsreader setup.

Then press 🔌 Test & Save Connection.

Test and save are one action deliberately: it will not save credentials it could not authenticate with, so a saved connection is a working connection. On success you get "Connection verified. Credentials saved."

Max Connections

Put in the number your provider's plan allows — usually 50 or 60, stated on your plan page.

Getting this wrong is the single most common setup mistake, in both directions:

• Too high and the provider refuses the extra ones. You will see 502 too many connections errors and less throughput than a correct value, not more. The app detects this and shows a banner.
• Too low and you leave speed on the table for no reason.

More connections than your plan allows never means more speed. It means errors.

Choosing a newsgroup

This is where your encrypted articles are posted. Three are offered:

The group must exist on your provider or posting fails. Nothing about your content is visible from the group — subjects carry no meaningful names.

Consumers do not need to match. The group travels in the share link.

Verifying properly

✅ Validate Full Configuration goes further than the connection test: it checks the whole configuration end to end, including that the app's own components are ready. Worth running once after first setup.

Optional, but do these two now

Set your default download location

Storage page → Default download location → Browse… → Save.

Every download offers this as its destination, which saves choosing every time. The Storage page also does a preflight against free space and will model a download of a given size before you start it — useful before committing to something large.

Pick a local disk if you have the choice. A network drive works, but it is frequently the slowest part of the chain, and that surprises people who assume their internet connection is the limit. When something is wrong shows how to measure which it is.

Add extra provider accounts, if you have them

Settings → Connection has Multi-account posting and Multi-account downloading below the main credentials.

If you hold accounts with two providers, adding both raises your ceiling — each has its own connection limit, and they add up rather than compete. There is also a Reuse posting accounts for downloading tick-box if the same accounts should serve both.

This is genuinely the most effective speed change available to most people. It beats every tuning setting in the app, because the limit it lifts is your provider's, not ours.

You are ready

The three Overview cards should now be green. From here:

• Share a folder of your own → Upload and publish
• Open a link someone sent you → Download a share
• Wonder whether to change any other setting → Recommended settings. Short answer: no. The defaults are tuned and the two things worth changing are on this page.

If setup will not go green

"Connection test failed" with correct credentials. Confirm the port and TLS together — 563 with TLS on, or 119 with TLS off. Providers publish both and mixing them fails in a way that reads like a bad password. Also check whether your provider requires you to enable NNTP access separately.

502 too many connections. Max Connections is above your plan, or another newsreader is using the same account at the same time. Your plan limit is shared across everything using that login.

License will not activate. It needs to reach our licensing service once. Check outbound HTTPS is not blocked. If the machine genuinely cannot reach the internet, contact support — an activation is possible without it.

The interface loads but says the worker is offline. The background worker handles all the real work and is a separate process. Restart the app. If it persists, the Logs page will say why, and that excerpt is exactly what support needs.

Everything else: When something is wrong, which starts with the built-in speed test so you are diagnosing from measurements rather than guesses.