Back in 1979 researchers at Duke University were experimenting with a way of communication with the nearby University of North Carolina. From these tests would be born USENET - a world wide internet discussion system which, nowadays with over 3.8TB of daily traffic, is still very popular. Users post and receive messages to and from newsgroups, which are organized into categories inside a hierarchy. For instance, comp is a hierarchy, comp.lang is a category and comp.lang.c is a newsgroup where items can be read and posted.
Architecture - keeping it freeOne of the major advantages USENET has over BBS is that its distributed. There are many news servers which make up the system, with individual users connecting to one of these. When a user wishes to read messages in newsgroups they are subscribed to, they contact their news server which will send all the messages to them. When posting a message, the poster sends the data to their news server. This news server will then forward the data to other news server it knows about, which then further forward the data to servers that they know about etc until the message has propagated throughout the entire network. This approach is both flexible and resilient, no wonder then that P2P copied it as a foundation for their communication.
Getting onIn order to send or receive posts you will need a news server to connect to. The majority of ISPs do provide this service so that should be your first port of call. If not, there are a number of alternatives - Google groups acts as both a news server and reader, secondly the NG alt.free.newsservers provides a list of free news servers which you can connect to. Secondly a news reader is needed. As previously mentioned Google groups acts as an online reader, however there are some limitations with it's UI and so you may prefer a more traditional client. The majority of systems do provide news readers, such as the one built into Outlook on Windows.
NetiquetteDepending on the newsgroup, USENET can be a fierce and intimidating place if you do not follow a number of rules. Broadly, NGs are broadly split into two categories - moderated and unmoderated. When users post to unmoderated groups their messages will appear without any further human interaction, however when posting to moderated NGs a moderator, who follows the group charter (rules), needs to okay the message before it appears. Each group is different and as such, before you post to any group you should read the charter (if there is one) and/or review a number of existing messages to pick up the general tone. A number of common newbie mistakes are firstly to have inappropriate subjects (how will people know what your post is about), have far too long signatures (if your signature is longer than the message then there's probably something wrong!) and to top post (when ever replying to a message you should place it after what has gone before, if you do not then the news readers will be unable to maintain the topic's correct post hierarchy.) Above all else respect other users and NO SPAMMING!
Organization | | In USENET, the majority of newsgroups are organized into 9 broad hierarchies: | | | comp - Computer related discussion | | humanities - Discussion on art, literature and philosophy | | misc - Miscellaneous topics | | news - Announcements/discussions about USENET | | rec - Recreational and entertainment topics | | sci - Science related posts | | soc - Social discussions | | talk - Talk about controversial items |
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These 8 are known as the "big 8" and have been since the USENET restructuring of 1987 (also known as the great renaming.) Lastly
alt also exists for alternative, specialized discussions and is less organized than the big 8. Other, specialized hierarchy's do exist, but these only form a small fraction of the NGs out there.
BinariesIn recent years, the distribution of binary files over USENET has become very popular. The category alt.binaries is the main category, with numerous newsgroups. Although it is perfectly possible to find legal content on here, more and more these groups are being used for the distribution of illegal media and as such many ISPs do block alt.binary (not least because the large post sizes take up much resources.)
Looking towards the futureThis article previously mentioned the 3.8 TB of data daily send around USENET, figures collected since 1995 show that year on year this figure is rising. However, sadly it doesn't mean that there are waves of new posters each year. Instead a massive percentage of this figure comprises of binary files and spam. There are many internet based forms of communication (such as this forum) which replaces USENET and as such more recently certain ISPs have ceased supporting news servers. Having said this, there is a hardcore of USENET posters out there and the unique properties of USENET means that it will always be useful. Google groups have opened up the world of newsgroups to the less technical savvy computer owners, who do not wish to get involved in the technical details.
LinksGeneral USENET information and advice
http://www.newsreaders.com/guide/netiquette.html
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