Usenet newsgroup
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A Usenet newsgroup is a
Before the adoption of the World Wide Web, Usenet newsgroups were among the most popular Internet services.
Communication is facilitated by the
Types
Newsgroups generally come in either of two types, binary or text. There is no technical difference between the two, but the naming differentiation allows users and servers with limited facilities to minimize network bandwidth usage. Generally, Usenet conventions and rules are enacted with the primary intention of minimizing the overall amount of network traffic and resource usage. Typically, the newsgroup is focused on a particular topic of interest. A message sent for publication on a newsgroup is called a "post". Some newsgroups allow posts on a wide variety of themes, regarding anything a member chooses to discuss as
Back when the early community was the pioneering computer society, the common habit seen with many posts was a notice at the end that disclosed whether the author had (or was free of) a personal interest (financial, political or otherwise) in making the post. This is rarer now, and the posts must be read more skeptically, as with other media. Privacy and phishing issues have also risen in importance.
Usenet newsgroups posters and operators usually do not make money from their occupations on the platform.
The number of newsgroups grew from more than 100 as of 1983[2] to more than 110,000, but only 20,000 or so of those are active.[citation needed] Newsgroups vary in popularity; some newsgroups receive fewer than a dozen posts per year while the most popular can get several thousand in under an hour.
Binary
While newsgroups were not created with the intention of distributing files such as pictures, sound and video, they have proven to be quite effective for this. As of 2022, some remain popular as an alternative to BitTorrent to share and download files.[4]
Because newsgroups are widely distributed, a file uploaded once will be spread to many other servers and can then be downloaded by an unlimited number of users. More useful is that users download from a local news server, rather than from a more distant machine with perhaps limited connectivity, as may be the case with
There were originally a number of obstacles to the transfer of binary files over Usenet. Usenet was originally designed with the transmission of text in mind, and so the encoding of posts caused losses in binary data where the data was not part of the protocol's
Additionally, there was a limit on the size of individual posts so that large files could not be sent as single posts. To get around this, Newsreaders were developed which were able to split long files into several posts. Intelligent newsreaders at the other end could then automatically group such split files into single files, allowing the user to easily retrieve the file. These advances have meant that Usenet is used to send and receive many
There are two main issues that pose problems for transmitting large files over newsgroups. The first is
Many major news servers have a retention time of more than seven years.[5] A number of websites exist to keep an index of files posted to binary newsgroups.
Partly because of such long retention times, as well as growing
Moderated newsgroups
Most Newsgroups are not moderated. A moderated newsgroup has one or more individuals who must approve posts before they are published. A separate address is used to submit posts and the moderators then propagate those they approve of. The first moderated newsgroups appeared in 1984 under mod.* according to RFC 2235, "Hobbes' Internet Timeline".
Distribution
Transmission within and at the bounds of the network uses the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) (Internet standard RFC 3977 of 2006, updating RFC 977 of 1986).
Newsgroup servers are hosted by various organizations and institutions. Most
Every host of a news server maintains agreements with other nearby news servers to synchronize regularly. In this way news servers form a redundant network. When a user posts to one news server, the post is stored locally. That server then shares posts with the servers that are connected to it for those newsgroups they both carry. Those servers do likewise, propagating the posts through the network. For newsgroups that are not widely carried, sometimes a carrier group is used for crossposting to aid distribution. This is typically only useful for groups that have been removed or newer alt.* groups. Crossposts between hierarchies, outside of the Big 8 and alt.* hierarchies, are prone to failure.
Hierarchies
Newsgroups are often arranged into hierarchies, theoretically making it simpler to find related groups. The term top-level hierarchy refers to the hierarchy defined by the prefix before the first dot.
The most commonly known hierarchies are the Usenet hierarchies. So for instance newsgroup rec.arts.sf.starwars.games would be in the rec.* top-level Usenet hierarchy, where the asterisk (*) is defined as a wildcard character. There were seven original major hierarchies of Usenet newsgroups, known as the "Big 7":
- comp.* — Discussion of computer-related topics
- news.* — Discussion of Usenet itself
- sci.* — Discussion of scientific subjects
- rec.* — Discussion of recreational activities (e.g. games and hobbies)
- soc.* — Socialising and discussion of social issues.
- talk.* — Discussion of contentious issues such as religion and politics.
- misc.* — Miscellaneous discussion—anything which does not fit in the other hierarchies.
These were all created in the Great Renaming of 1986–1987, before which all of these newsgroups were in the net.* hierarchy. At that time there was a great controversy over what newsgroups should be allowed. Among those that the Usenet cabal (who effectively ran the Big 7 at the time) did not allow were those concerning recipes, recreational drug use, and sex.
This situation resulted in the creation of an alt.* (short for "alternative") Usenet hierarchy, under which these groups would be allowed. Over time, the laxness of rules on newsgroup creation in alt.* compared to the Big 7 meant that many new topics could, given time, gain enough popularity to get a Big 7 newsgroup. There was a rapid growth of alt.* as a result, and the trend continues to this day. Because of the anarchistic nature with which the groups sprang up, some jokingly referred to ALT standing for "
In 1995, humanities.* was created for the discussion of the humanities (e.g. literature, philosophy), and the Big 7 became the Big 8.
The alt.* hierarchy has discussion of all kinds of topics, and many hierarchies for discussion specific to a particular geographical area or in a language other than English.
Before a new Big 8 newsgroup can be created, an RFD (Request For Discussion) must be posted into the newsgroup news.announce.newgroups, which is then discussed in news.groups.proposals. Once the proposal has been formalized with a name, description, charter, the Big-8 Management Board will vote on whether to create the group. If the proposal is approved by the Big-8 Management Board, the group is created. Groups are removed in a similar manner.
Creating a new group in the alt.* hierarchy is not subject to the same rules; anybody can create a newsgroup, and anybody can remove it, but most news administrators will ignore these requests unless a local user requests the group by name.
Further hierarchies
There are a number of newsgroup hierarchies outside of the Big 8 (and alt.*) that can be found on many news servers. These include non-English language groups, groups managed by companies or organizations about their products, geographic/local hierarchies, and even non-internet network boards routed into NNTP. Examples include (alphabetically):
- aus.* – Australian news groups
- ba.* – Discussion in the San Francisco Bay area
- ca.* – Discussion in California
- can.* – Canadian news groups
- cn.* – Chinese news groups
- chi.* – Discussions about the Chicago area
- de.* – Discussions in German
- dictator.* – Discussions about bad governance related to the Dictator's Handbook
- ec.* – Discussions about Ecuadorian culture and society
- england.* – Discussions (mostly) local to England, see also uk.*
- fidonet.* – Discussions routed from FidoNet
- fr.* – Discussions in French
- fj.* – "From Japan," discussions in Japanese
- gnu.* – Discussions about GNU software
- hawaii.* – Discussions (mostly) local to Hawaii
- hk.* – Hong Kong newsgroups
- hp.* – Hewlett-Packard internal news groups
- it.* – Discussions in Italian
- microsoft.* – Discussions about Microsoft products
- nl.* – Dutch news groups
- no.* – Norwegian news groups
- pl.* – Polish news groups
- tw.* – Taiwan news groups
- uk.* – Discussions on matters in the United Kingdom
- yale.* – Discussions (mostly) local to Yale University
Additionally, there is the free.* hierarchy, which can be considered "more alt than alt.*". There are many local sub-hierarchies within this hierarchy, usually for specific countries or cultures (such as free.it.* for Italy).
See also
- List of newsgroups
- List of Usenet newsreaders
- alt.* hierarchy
- News client
- NNTP
- News aggregator
References
- . Retrieved 3 June 2019.
- ^ Emerson, Sandra L. (October 1983). "Usenet / A Bulletin Board for Unix Users". BYTE. pp. 219–236. Retrieved 31 January 2015.
- ^ "Usenet storage is more than 60 petabytes (60000 terabytes)". binsearch.info. Archived from the original on 2020-05-21. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
- Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2023-04-28.
- ^ "Retention Increase to 2600 Days at NewsDemon". Newsdemon.com. 28 September 2015. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
- ^ "usenet backup (uBackup)". Wikihow.com. Retrieved February 14, 2012.
External links
- The Big-8 Management Board
- Alphabetical list of Usenet hierarchies at the Wayback Machine (archived April 28, 2006)