Who will step up? Will NZBMatrix return? Clearly the need for an indexer still exists, despite numerous premium Usenet mirrors now complying with DMCA take down notices, these are far and few between, usually limited to big film studio releases, which are promptly re-posted anyway. Presumably the owners of NZBMatrix still have all the site code and databases, they need 3 things to re-launch.
1. Money
This is a big problem, with more and more payment gateways refusing to do business with these types of sites, right now BitCoin is the only solution I can think of to this problem, unfortunately it cuts out a large percentage of the user base with people too afraid or too stupid to take the leap.
2. Hosting
The elephant in the room in the wake of recent shutdowns is the Netherlands, due to recent court rulings it is no longer really possible to host here without persecution, leaving site owners little choice but to look East – fortunately there’s still plenty of former Soviet nations impoverished and without unfavorable laws regarding Internet conduct, this comes at a price though.
3. Domain name
This is also somewhat complex, as the owners wouldn’t want to immediately put themselves in the spotlight by using the same or similar site name and domain name, so the question begs – how to spread the word. Tor comes to mind as a reasonable way to keep the name without the unwanted attention, unfortunately again this culls the potential userbase. If there was a reasonable way to contact former members, the site could operate purely without a domain name, instead browseable only by IP (or even IPv6), this would seem a nifty solution to those nasty domain blacklists, as long as you had a twitter or IRC channel to advertise every time you changed address.
