Diagnose it yourself in a couple of minutes, and if you still need us, hand over a report we can act on immediately.
Start with the speed test even when the problem is not obviously speed. It measures your provider and your disk separately, and a surprising share of "downloads keep stalling" and "verify takes forever" turn out to be one number in its output.
The speed test
Help & Support → Check your speed → Test my connection & drive speed → Run the test.
It measures three things separately, which is the point — most tools give you one number and leave you guessing which part was slow:
- Your Usenet provider — real articles over real connections
- Writing to your download drive
- Reading from your download drive, including trying different read sizes
Then it gives a plain-language verdict naming which of the three is your ceiling.
Read-only test skips the write measurement — use it on a NAS you would rather not write to.
It will not run while a transfer is in flight, deliberately — measuring a provider that is already busy with your own download tells you nothing.
Send us the result
The Copy button builds a report and puts it on your clipboard: "Copied — paste it into your email to support".
Paste it into an email or a Discord message. It is the single most useful thing you can send us — it turns "it's slow" into numbers, and it is redacted, so it carries no credentials or paths that identify you.
Reading the verdict
| It says | Means | Do |
|---|---|---|
| The provider is the ceiling | Your account or plan is the limit | Check Max Connections matches your plan; consider a second account |
| The drive is the ceiling | Storage cannot absorb what the network delivers | Move downloads to a faster disk; prefer local over network |
| The app is the ceiling | Neither of the above explains it | Send us the report — this is the case we want to see |
Common problems
"It is slow"
Run the speed test. In order of how often each turns out to be the cause:
- The destination disk, especially a network drive or an external USB one
- The provider connection limit — Max Connections set above or below your plan
- Antivirus scanning every written byte, which can halve throughput on Windows
- Connections split with streaming — the banner at the top shows the split, and can give either side everything
A download stopped
Press download again. You lose nothing — downloads are checkpointed and resume from where they stopped rather than restarting.
If it stops repeatedly at a similar place, check free space, then the Logs page.
A download is stuck at 99%
Usually not stuck. At the end there is a final pass that reads the files back off your disk to confirm they are intact, and it reports its own rate and ETA. On a slow destination it can take a while, because it is limited by read speed.
The percentage deliberately holds at 99% until everything is genuinely finished, including that pass.
If it truly is not moving — no rate, no ETA, no log activity — send us a diagnostics bundle.
"Missing or expired articles"
Usenet retention is finite and some pieces are gone.
Someone else's share: nothing on your side fixes it. Tell the owner.
Your own share: Redundancy → Repair, or re-publish. See Verify and repair.
"System is starting up" or brief errors just after launch
The backend is still booting, possibly resuming interrupted work. The interface polls and clears by itself. A large database can take minutes.
The worker is offline
The background worker does the real work and runs as a separate process. Restart the app. If it persists, the Logs page will say why, and that excerpt is exactly what we need.
Antivirus interference (Windows)
Real-time scanning of every written byte is a genuine 2× slowdown, and it can look like network trouble. Exclude your download folder and the app's install folder. The Windows installer offers a Defender exclusion for the app; a banner appears if the pattern is detected.
Access denied on a private share
You are not authorised on the current version. Send the owner Settings → Identity → Your Identity Token and ask them to add you and re-publish — the re-publish is required, and produces a new link you also need.
Note that identity is per-install: your laptop and your desktop are different identities.
A re-download finished implausibly fast
Correct. Downloading into a folder that already holds good copies verifies them against the published hashes and reuses them. The progress line says how many were reused.
The other diagnostic tools
System Checkup
Settings → System → System Checkup. Plain-language health checks with one-click fixes. Worth running before anything else if the app is behaving oddly rather than slowly.
Logs
Logs page tails the backend live, with a level filter — set it to Info & above or errors only to cut the noise, and Load earlier to go back.
When contacting us, include the excerpt around the problem rather than the whole file.
System
System page shows throughput, memory and connection pool health — useful for confirming connections are actually being established.
Diagnostics bundle
Settings → System → Diagnostics → Download diagnostic bundle.
A zip of logs, configuration and a system snapshot, redacted — no passwords, no API keys, no license key. This is what to attach when the speed test alone does not explain the problem.
Getting help
Discord — fastest
The invite is on the beta banner and in Settings → Support. Best for "is this normal?" and for anything where a back-and-forth beats an email thread.
support@usenetshare.com. Help & Support → Contact support pre-fills your version.
Bug report from inside the app
Help & Support → Report a bug. Pick a category, describe it, and leave Attach redacted diagnostics bundle ticked. This is the best route for a real fault because everything needed arrives together.
Let us look at it directly
For anything hard to describe, we can connect to your install and look at the logs with you. You control it, and it is off until you switch it on: Remote support.
What to include when you contact us
In rough order of usefulness:
- The speed test report (the Copy button) — for anything performance-related
- The diagnostics bundle — for a fault
- What you were doing and what you expected instead
- The share size and shape if relevant — 4 files or 2 million is a different problem
- Your provider and plan connection limit
- Where downloads go — local disk, USB, or network drive
Points 1 and 2 are redacted and safe to send. Please never send a share link (it can contain the decryption key), your provider password, or your license key.