1. Status bar already shows total size of queue and free space on dl drive.
Yep, the main status bar does, but I was thinking of an information bar that coincides with the multiple file selection you might be working on creating. This would be more of a convenience feature, having pertinent info (the size of the current selection right next to your available free space along with other info) grouped together, all based on the task you're currently performing. Also, it would be nice if all of your drives free space were shown, so you could more easily decide where to download or unRAR things.
2. IIRC, Alt.Binz does download an NZB if Newzleech > 2000 posts, it just contains the html error message. I suppose that could be error-checked. 
I tested this and it doesn't seem to work. Using the example I used in my last post, do a search for "replica". Sort the hits by the files column. Now select 20 of the files with >100 files in them and 'add to queue (paused)' -- nothing will happen. Now deselect a release or two using CTRL + a mouse click. Once the total file count goes below 2001, the NZB will be created (it will just take a while) after choosing 'add to queue (paused)' again. I thought this was alt.binz's fault at first, but I went to the newzleech site, used the same search and selections and it threw up an error, unfamiliar to me, explaining the 2000 file cut-off.
I think the best way to get around this is by treating a multi-selection as many individual releases during the NZB download phase. I did a mini-test, downloading two NZBs separately and then combining them into one NZB, and it seems that they're pretty close to equal in overall download size. The combined NZB is more efficient only by a few hundred bytes in my test. If this combined file size efficiency is greater than I realize, perhaps a more intelligent separation of multi-file NZB could be worked out.
3. Pages: Alt.Binz just follows the site in this respect. To get more results per page you need to be logged in to the site, unfortunately. Sending multiple requests to the site to dl every page in the possible range is a really bad idea, I think. Just narrow your search by using better search terms. 
True enough. I was worried about this one as I don't want to bombard the last remaining free databases with spider-like activity. However, maybe a reasonable waiting period between page fetches to build a mutli-page display could be worked out? The reason I ask this is because newzleech is not exactly built for search accuracy (unless you're search by post REQ number as you do Hecks).
Like I mentioned earlier, if I wanted to search for a group like DREAMLiGHT's releases, I'd enter "dl" into the search field. Further restrict the search by entering a min file size of 3000 and a max of 5000 (since DREAMLiGHT puts out DVD-sized releases), and you'll get 8 pages of hits back currently. Most of these matched files are not released by DREAMLiGHT. Unfortunately, newzleech won't match "dl-" to make this search more productive -- it ignores the hyphen and most other non-letter characters. On the other hand, alt.binz will allow you to more precisely match the hits you receive against a second term, referred to as the 'Filter subject' field.
If I entered "dl-" into the 'Filter subject' field, I'd get a set of matches closer to what I wanted. I still get some bad matches, so adding a quotation mark to the front of that "dl-" ("dl-) will get me exactly what I want. On the negative side, I only see eight good matches now, all on the first page. There are seven more pages that might contain matches, but I'll have to flip through them. This makes a multi-selection impossible across pages.
The two ways I can think of to fix this are:
1.) Downloading all the pages (in a reasonable way) for a single display through alt.binz. Also, I see this as a possible benefit for newzleech as you won't be clicking back and forth between pages. This could save newzleech some bandwidth, unless alt.binz actually caches these search pages instead of refetching them.
2.) Implementing the 'selection pane' I proposed in my last post. This would let you click through the pages, look through the NFOs and IMDb info at your leisure, add the releases you want to the 'selection pane', then add your selection to the queue under one collection when you're finished. I know you could add these files to the queue singly, but things could get cluttered quickly that way. A 'selection pane' has the added benefit of being able to hold selections in place while performing different searches.
Think of how useful this would be for a task like making a mix of music to listen to. You could search for a bunch of different songs, move them over to the 'selection pane', then download them in one collection. You could do this with individual songs, and organize them into the same download folder, but I think that would be a lot more work.
4. The rest of your suggestions - progress indicator for NZB downloads, etc., are again all based on the assumption that the majority of users will dump large selections into one NZB instead of adding individual posts separately. I'm afraid you might be in the tiny minority here with that ... and since the time/effort required for you to learn to use Alt.Binz in the 'proper' way is a lot smaller than the time/effort probably required to implement your requests, I somehow doubt that they'll be implemented anytime soon.
Still, interesting read, thanks.
I think a progress indicator for NZB downloads would not only be beneficial to a multi-file selector, but also to the single-file user. A single release can easily have a NZB well over 1 MB, so I'm guessing can take a decent amount of time to download for someone with slower-than-optimum-broadband. For example, a recent HD release of the movie Superbad has a NZB size of 3.27 MB. Now, factor in that your currently running downloads are using all or most of your bandwidth. Adding files to the queue could seem to take forever. Without a progress bar of some kind, you might doubt that they're being added at all (until they finally pop up).
Lol, when I was trying to create the 2001+ file NZBs from an alt.binz newzleech search, I thought my NZB was possibly hundreds of MBs and I just had to patiently wait it out until the collection popped up. Then I thought the current download was stealing all the bandwidth so I paused the downloads. Then after another two minutes, the jig was up!
I don't think it's that uncommon for people to create collections with multiple releases. I've done it a lot in the past -- especially for TV seasons that I missed (grabbing most of, or an entire season in one go), or an entire series of TV shows (grabbing several seasons of a series on DVD in one go). I think downloading music by artist applies here too.
I suppose it boils down to how you prefer to search for things. If you search specifically for one thing, by post number or by specific name, a lot of my suggestions wouldn't help you out. However, if you search by release group name, or by artist name, or by series name and grab a lot of stuff at once, I think there is room for improvement in alt.binz here. Hopefully, my suggestions might help out. Thanks for the feedback and challenging responses everyone.
P.S. - One thing that I forgot to mention when describing the process in my last post. On the initial dialog that pops up for your main collection, you'll most definitely want to have the option to choose to sort the releases in your collection either directly under the main collection, or create subcollections based on the release names under the main collection. There are certain times when I'd rather put a multi-file collection in one folder and see it visually displayed in one list in the download queue, and other times when I'd like to separate a multi-file collection into different folders and see it displayed in the download queue in a more hierarchical structure for easier manipulation.
P.P.S. - Are my posts getting longer and longer?
