Glossary
The Usenet comes with a language of its own: articles and headers, hierarchies, NZB files, retention. The terms below explain briefly what lies behind them — sorted alphabetically and understandable without prior knowledge.
Article
The smallest unit in the Usenet: a single message held on a newsserver. Larger content is split into many articles and reassembled when you retrieve it.
Article Body
The actual content of an article. With text postings the message itself, with binaries an encoded part of the file.
Article Header
The head of an article, holding the technical details: sender, subject, date, newsgroup, message ID and the route the article has taken across the newsservers.
Big 8
The eight large hierarchies that form the original core of the Usenet: comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc and talk. New groups within them are created through a formal voting procedure. The well-known alt hierarchy is explicitly not part of it.
Binaries
A binary file contains both alphabetical and non-alphabetical characters and is therefore not a purely text-based file. This type of file first has to be decoded.
More about binariesBinary Newsgroup
A newsgroup where no discussions take place and files are exchanged instead. Usually recognisable by the word binaries in its name, for example alt.binaries.*.
Completion
The share of a posting’s articles that a provider actually holds and can deliver. If a single article is missing, the posting can no longer be fully reassembled.
More about completenessEternal September
Until 1993, every September brought new students into the Usenet who learned the etiquette from the experienced ones. When AOL opened access to its customers in September 1993, that rhythm ended: the influx never stopped again. Since then the term stands for the loss of the old Usenet culture.
News Feed
The exchange of articles between newsservers. Every server passes new articles on to its peers, so that a posting is available worldwide within a short time.
Newsgroup Hierarchy
Newsgroups are named hierarchically, from general to specific and separated by dots. comp.lang.python belongs to comp and within it to lang. The name alone therefore tells you what a group is about.
Newsgroups
The topics which are discussed in the Usenet are categorised in newsgroups. Every newsgroup is dedicated to a specific topic and can therefore be compared with a thread in an Internet forum.
Newsreader
The program you use to access the Usenet. It logs in to the newsserver, browses newsgroups, downloads articles and reassembles content that was split up.
More about newsreadersNewsservers
All Usenet files are retained on newsservers.
NNTP
Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is the transfer protocol for messages in newsgroups. It communicates between the client and server, sending and receiving messages.
NZB
An NZB file is an index file. It holds no content itself, only the information about which articles on the newsservers belong to a download. The newsreader reads the NZB file, fetches the matching articles and reassembles the original file from them.
Par Files
During the transport between Usenet servers, individual parts of files can be damaged. Par files (Parity Files) allow these RAR files to be easily repaired.
Posting
A contribution that is published to the Usenet. With binaries, a posting consists of many individual articles that together make up a file.
RAR
RAR is a compression format similar to ZIP, which allows the size of individual files to be reduced. This enables shorter download times.
Retention time
The retention time provides information on how long a message or a file remains available in the newsgroups and/or is saved there.
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