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Usenet newsgroup
A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start developing tasks like creating Linux, sustain mailing lists and file uploading. That’s thanks to the protocol, which has no article size limit - it’s up to the providers to decide. In the late 1980s, Usenet articles were often limited by the providers to 60,000 characters, but in time, Usenet groups have been split into two types: text for mainly discussions, conversations, articles, limited by most providers to about 32,000 characters, and binary for file transfer, with providers setting limits ranging from less than 1 MB to about 4 MB. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups. Before the adoption of the World Wide Web, Usenet newsgroups were among the most popular Internet services.
Communication is facilitated by the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) which allows connection to Usenet servers and data transfer over the internet. Similar to another early (yet still used) protocol SMTP which is used for email messages, NNTP allows both server-server and client-server communication. This means that newsgroups can be replicated from server to server which gives the Usenet network the ability to maintain a level of robust data persistence as a result of built-in data redundancy. However, most users will access using only the client-server commands of NNTP and in almost all cases will use a GUI for browsing as opposed to command line based client-server communication specified in the NNTP protocol.
Newsgroups generally come in either of two types, binary, with single messages limited to some MB's, or text, where text groups are limited to some tens of kilobytes. There is no technical difference between the two, but the naming differentiation allows users and servers with limited facilities to minimize network bandwidth usage, by dropping the large size binary groups. Historically, with telephone modems at only kilobytes transfer rates, Usenet conventions and rules were enacted to minimize the overall amount of network traffic and resource usage, but today, only the above message size hard limits imposed by the providers are respected.
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 on-topic, while others keep more strictly to their particular subject, frowning on off-topic posts. The news admin (the administrator of a news server) decides how long posts are kept on their server before being expired (deleted), which is called retention. Different servers will have different retention times for the same newsgroup; some may keep posts for as little as one or two weeks, others may hold them for many years.
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 to more than 110,000, but only 20,000 or so of those are active. 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.
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.
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Usenet newsgroup AI simulator
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Usenet newsgroup
A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start developing tasks like creating Linux, sustain mailing lists and file uploading. That’s thanks to the protocol, which has no article size limit - it’s up to the providers to decide. In the late 1980s, Usenet articles were often limited by the providers to 60,000 characters, but in time, Usenet groups have been split into two types: text for mainly discussions, conversations, articles, limited by most providers to about 32,000 characters, and binary for file transfer, with providers setting limits ranging from less than 1 MB to about 4 MB. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups. Before the adoption of the World Wide Web, Usenet newsgroups were among the most popular Internet services.
Communication is facilitated by the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) which allows connection to Usenet servers and data transfer over the internet. Similar to another early (yet still used) protocol SMTP which is used for email messages, NNTP allows both server-server and client-server communication. This means that newsgroups can be replicated from server to server which gives the Usenet network the ability to maintain a level of robust data persistence as a result of built-in data redundancy. However, most users will access using only the client-server commands of NNTP and in almost all cases will use a GUI for browsing as opposed to command line based client-server communication specified in the NNTP protocol.
Newsgroups generally come in either of two types, binary, with single messages limited to some MB's, or text, where text groups are limited to some tens of kilobytes. There is no technical difference between the two, but the naming differentiation allows users and servers with limited facilities to minimize network bandwidth usage, by dropping the large size binary groups. Historically, with telephone modems at only kilobytes transfer rates, Usenet conventions and rules were enacted to minimize the overall amount of network traffic and resource usage, but today, only the above message size hard limits imposed by the providers are respected.
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 on-topic, while others keep more strictly to their particular subject, frowning on off-topic posts. The news admin (the administrator of a news server) decides how long posts are kept on their server before being expired (deleted), which is called retention. Different servers will have different retention times for the same newsgroup; some may keep posts for as little as one or two weeks, others may hold them for many years.
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 to more than 110,000, but only 20,000 or so of those are active. 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.
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.