- What is Usenet?
- Usenet is a world wide network of servers exchanging newsgroup articles.
- What are Newsgroups?
- Newsgroups are a hierarchal group of online discussion forums read through software called a news client.
- What is a News Client?
- A News Client or News Reader is software used to download Newsgroups. The most common News Client is Outlook Express; however, there are many software packages available which do a much better job at handling binary downloads. For a list of News Clients / News Readers please check out the Newsreaders section on the menu bar of this site.
- What are Usenet binaries?
- Usenet was traditionally used to exchange discussion type articles in a forum based format.. Binary articles are articles on Usenet which contain uuencoded files.
- How can I access Newsgroups?
- Traditionally your ISP will provide newsgroup access as a standard part of their service (similar to email). You can generally connect to your ISP’s news server using news.domain.com (domain being your ISP’s domain). Most ISPs these days run very poor news servers with retention times of a couple of days and scores of missing articles. If you’re planning on extensively using newsgroups you’d be better served to use one of the premium Newsgroup Service Providers reviewed on this site. For instructions on downloading newsgroups using various news clients please visit the Tutorials section of this site.
- How can I search Newsgroups?
- There are two types of searches you can do on newsgroups. You can search to see if a specific newsgroup is carried on the server you’re looking for. This can be done with your news client or on your provider’s website as seen here (http://www.giganews.com/newsgroup_search.html).You may also want to search for specific articles within newsgroups. News clients like Newsrover offer you the ability to search for specific keywords within the header information of the articles on Usenet to help you search Usenet.
- Doesn’t my ISP offer free newsgroup access? Why should I pay?
- Most ISPs these days run very poor news servers with retention times of a couple of days and scores of missing articles. If you’re planning on extensively using newsgroups you’d be better served to use one of the premium Newsgroup Service Providers reviewed on this site. Premium Newsgroup Service Providers can offer over three years of binary retention, 2000+ days of text retention and 99%+ completion. These service levels are usually leaps and bounds above the average ISP’s news servers.
- What is a concurrent connection?
- A concurrent connection refers to the number of streams you can open up at any one time to a news server. Most servers limit the number of connections to help control the speed at which you can connect. If you find a server with a high limit on the number of connections you may be able to download at a faster rate.
- What is Usenet retention and why is it important?
- Retention refers to the number of days newsgroup articles are stored on the server. Longer retention equals access to more Usenet.
- What is Newsgroup completion and why is it important?
- Completion refers to the percentage of articles a newsgroup server has out of the number of articles it was fed. For example if a news server takes in 1,000,000 articles a day and loses 100,000 a day that server is said to have a 90% completion rate. You effectively lose 10% of your Usenet access, even though you are paying for access to 100% of Usenet. If your Usenet service provider has poor completion rates, then you aren’t getting what you pay for.
To learn more about Usenet and Newsgroups we recommend watching an informative series of Usenet videos created by Giganews.