About Newsgroups |
| Brief History |
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The NewsGroups were originally designed as a place for communication between people. (When it was created, this was mainly scientists and military personnel.) As such, it was designed to carry text messages. It was not designed to carry files. Because of this, there are workarounds needed in order to reliably transmit files across the newsgroups. |
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Servers |
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A News Server is a machine that stores the messages on the newsgroups. It is responsible for keeping up to date copies of everything that has been sent to the groups it carries. Not every news server has to carry every news group, since it can result in a lot of space being used up to store material no one will look at. It is up to the people who own the server to decide what topics it will carry. |
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| Servers > Authentication |
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In order to connect to some servers, they require that you have permission. There are two basic ways of checking for permission. The first is to see if you are on the same network as them. Many ISPs use this option, since they want all their users to be able to connect to their news server, but not outsiders. The other method is Authentication. This basically means that every user is assigned a unique user name, and a password to verify it is them. When connecting to the server, users are asked for this information, and only if what they supply is correct are they allowed to talk to the server. |
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| Groups |
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A news group is essentially a topic. Any message can be sent to any group, but if it does not relate to what the group was created for, it is considered "off-topic". Sending off-topic messages is generally considered quite rude, since it's fairly obvious that if they were interested in that kind of message, they would also be reading groups where it was on-topic. Each group has a specific name, made up of sections, divided by "."s, for example: alt.comp.software.newsreaders.newsbin These names represent a hierarchical structure, meaning that there is also a group alt.comp.software.newsreaders that alt.comp.software.newsreaders.newsbin resides in. |
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| Headers |
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Each message, or article in a newsgroup is represented by a header. The header contains the basic information about the article, and can be viewed without retrieving the entire article. |
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Posts |
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A post is the entire set of articles intended to be interpreted as one unit. This can vary from a single article with a small amount of text, to multiple larger articles which were broken up to keep each individual part at a reasonable size. |
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| Posts > Articles |
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Each article is associated with a single header. The terms for some of the required bits of information in an article are explained below. |
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| Posts > Articles > Subject |
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The Subject is just as it sounds, it describes , in a single line, the topic of the article (and usually the whole post). |
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| Posts > Articles > Poster |
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This is the provided email address of the person who posted the article. In the binary groups, this is rarely a valid address. |
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| Posts > Articles > PostID |
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This is a unique ID assigned to this particular article. |
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| Posts > Multi-Part Posts |
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Multi-part posts are large posts that have not been posted as a single article, but rather been split up and posted separately to avoid their being dropped by news servers. The news servers have some limit for the size of a post and they will not propagate posts that exceed that limit. Each article that makes up a multi-part post is often referred to as a part. When files are posted to the newsgroups, it is most often done using multi-part posts, since the files are usually much larger than the size limit mentioned above. |
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| Posts > Encoding |
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Files contain binary data, which contains a lot of bit strings that news servers were not designed to deal with. As a result, files have to be encoded into a news server-friendly format before being posted to the newsgroups. Three of the most common forms of encoding are mentioned below. |
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| Posts > Encoding > UUEncode |
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This was the first encoding format used, converting every byte of binary data into standard characters which were indistinguishable from normal text. This resulted in having to send about 33% more data to represent a binary file. |
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| Posts > Encoding > yEnc |
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yEnc was designed to combat a few limitations of UUEncoding. It specifically calls for the filename to be included in the subject of the post, as well as in the body of each of the parts. It also uses many more non-text characters than UUEncoding, avoiding only those bit strings that are used as command codes by the news servers. This results in a substantial saving of data, requiring only about 2% more data than the original file contained. Since yEnc is more recent, there are still some news readers which are not capable of decoding yEnc files. Newsbin does not have any problems with them though. |
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| Posts > Encoding > BinHex |
| BinHex is a format most often used for Macintosh files. Some newsreaders, such as NewsBin 4.x, do not support BinHex encoded files. |
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| Copyright 2003 DJI Interprises |