Usenet

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A diagram of Usenet servers and clients. The blue, green, and red dots on the servers represent the
groups they carry. Arrows between servers indicate newsgroup group exchanges (feeds). Arrows
between clients and servers indicate that a user is subscribed to a certain group and reads or submits
articles.

Usenet (/ˈjuːznɛt/) is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was

developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom
Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.[1] Users read and post
messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as
newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to
Internet forums that became widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs,
though posts are stored on the server sequentially.[2][3]

A major difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and
dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of
news servers that store and forward messages to one another via "news feeds". Individual users may
read messages from and post messages to a local server, which may be operated by anyone.

Usenet is culturally and historically significant in the networked world, having given rise to, or
popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ", "flame", sockpuppet, and
"spam".[4] In the early 1990s, shortly before access to the Internet became commonly affordable,
Usenet connections via Fidonet's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions
and other communication widespread, not needing a server, just (local) telephone service.[5]

The name Usenet comes from the term "users network".[2] The first Usenet group was NET.general,
which quickly became net.general.[6] The first commercial spam on Usenet was from immigration
attorneys Canter and Siegel advertising green card services.[6]
Contents

1 Introduction

2 ISPs, news servers, and newsfeeds

2.1 Newsreaders

2.2 Moderated and unmoderated newsgroups

2.3 Technical details

2.4 Organization

2.5 Binary content

2.5.1 Binary retention time

2.5.2 Legal issues

3 History

3.1 Network

3.2 Software

3.3 Public venue

3.4 Internet jargon and history

3.5 Decline

4 Usenet traffic changes

5 Archives

5.1 Archives by Google Groups and DejaNews

6 See also

6.1 Usenet newsreaders

6.2 Usenet/newsgroup service providers

6.3 Usenet terms

6.4 Usenet history

6.5 Usenet administrators

6.6 Usenet celebrities

7 References

8 Further reading

9 External links

Introduction

Usenet was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980, at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill and Duke University,[7][1] over a decade before the World Wide Web went online (and thus
before the general public received access to the Internet), making it one of the oldest computer network
communications systems still in widespread use. It was originally built on the "poor man's ARPANET",
employing UUCP as its transport protocol to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements
through the newly developed news software such as A News. The name "Usenet" emphasizes its
creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation.[8]

The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories known as newsgroups, which
are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, sci.math and sci.physics are
within the sci.* hierarchy. Or, talk.origins and talk.atheism are in the talk.* hierarchy. When a user
subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read.[9]

In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article. The set of articles
that can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a thread. Most modern newsreaders display
the articles arranged into threads and subthreads. For example, in the wine-making newsgroup;
"rec.crafts.winemaking," someone might start a thread called; "What's the best yeast?" and that thread
or conversation might grow into dozens of replies long, by perhaps six or eight different authors. Over
several days, that conversation about different wine yeasts might branch into several sub-threads in a
tree-like form.

When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user's news server. Each news server
talks to one or more other servers (its "newsfeeds") and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion,
the article is copied from server to server and should eventually reach every server in the network. The
later peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle, but for Usenet it is normally the sender,
rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Usenet was designed under conditions when networks
were much slower and not always available. Many sites on the original Usenet network would connect
only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out.[10] This is largely because the POTS
network was typically used for transfers, and phone charges were lower at night.
The format and transmission of Usenet articles is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages. The
difference between the two is that Usenet articles can be read by any user whose news server carries
the group to which the message was posted, as opposed to email messages, which have one or more
specific recipients.[11]

Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums, blogs, mailing lists and
social media. Usenet differs from such media in several ways: Usenet requires no personal registration
with the group concerned; information need not be stored on a remote server; archives are always
available; and reading the messages does not require a mail or web client, but a news client. However, it
is now possible to read and participate in Usenet newsgroups to a large degree using ordinary web
browsers since most newsgroups are now copied to several web sites.[12] The groups in alt.binaries are
still widely used for data transfer.

ISPs, news servers, and newsfeeds

Many Internet service providers, and many other Internet sites, operate news servers for their users to
access. ISPs that do not operate their own servers directly will often offer their users an account from
another provider that specifically operates newsfeeds. In early news implementations, the server and
newsreader were a single program suite, running on the same system. Today, one uses separate
newsreader client software, a program that resembles an email client but accesses Usenet servers
instead.[13]

Not all ISPs run news servers. A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer
because of the large amount of data involved, small customer base (compared to mainstream Internet
service), and a disproportionately high volume of customer support incidents (frequently complaining of
missing news articles). Some ISPs outsource news operations to specialist sites, which will usually appear
to a user as though the ISP itself runs the server. Many of these sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a
limited number of newsgroups. Commonly omitted from such a newsfeed are foreign-language
newsgroups and the alt.binaries hierarchy which largely carries software, music, videos and images, and
accounts for over 99 percent of article data.

There are also Usenet providers that offer a full unrestricted service to users whose ISPs do not carry
news, or that carry a restricted feed.
Newsreaders

Newsgroups are typically accessed with newsreaders: applications that allow users to read and reply to
postings in newsgroups. These applications act as clients to one or more news servers. Historically,
Usenet was associated with the Unix operating system developed at AT&T, but newsreaders are now
available for all major operating systems.[14] Modern mail clients or "communication suites" commonly
also have an integrated newsreader. Often, however, these integrated clients are of low quality,
compared to standalone newsreaders, and incorrectly implement Usenet protocols, standards and
conventions. Many of these integrated clients, for example the one in Microsoft's Outlook Express, are
disliked by purists because of their misbehavior.[15]

With the rise of the World Wide Web (WWW), web front-ends (web2news) have become more
common. Web front ends have lowered the technical entry barrier requirements to that of one
application and no Usenet NNTP server account. There are numerous websites now offering web based
gateways to Usenet groups, although some people have begun filtering messages made by some of the
web interfaces for one reason or another.[16][17] Google Groups[18] is one such web based front end
and some web browsers can access Google Groups via news: protocol links directly.[19]