Newsreader
A piece of software that is used to connect to Usenet. Free and paid newsreaders are available, which vary in their features and characteristics.
Header
A line of text that describes the name, upload-date and contents of a file in a post.
Post
The total of all files in a compilation uploaded to the group by a user, which for a binary file will usually contain an nfo file, a collection of binary file parts (archive) and a set of PAR2 files.
Parts
News servers limit the size of the files you can post, so large binary files must be split up into parts. This can be carried out by the news reader, but is usually done using WinRAR so that additional file compression can be applied.
NZB file
A single file which points your newsreader to all the parts of a particular post, making it much easier and quicker to find them.
rar
A compression format similar to zip compressed files.
Retention
This is the length of time in days that a post will last on the news server.
Completion
Described as a percentage, this illustrates a news server’s success rate at receiving complete posts for all the newsgroups it carries.
Streams
The number of connections your news reader has made with the server. The more streams you have, the quicker your download will be. The total number allowed depends on the server.
Cross-posting
This is the sending of a post to more than one newsgroup. Etiquette allows cross-posting to two or three relevant groups, any more and you risk being banned due to spam. Posting to an off topic group is of course, asking for trouble.
UUEncoding
An early encoding method used by news readers to convert binary files to ASCII text.
yEnc
A more popular encoding method which produces smaller text files than UUEncoding.
400 Per-user Connection Error
A message that informs a user that they have reached their limit of streams allowed by the server.
