Newsgroups

What are they?

Newsgroups are a part of the Internet that have been around since before the 'Web', and were originally used to exchange text messages or 'posts', in a similar way to an online forum.

Also known as Usenet, they have no fixed web address like a forum, but exist on multiple, independently run, News Servers around the World which store all their locally posted messages.

Messages posted to a group on one particular News Server will be shared with all the other News Servers that also 'carry' that group, ensuring they all possess up to date information.

A good News Server will carry thousands of Newsgroups including the ones known as 'the Binaries', used to distribute binary files (Audio and Video etc).

How does it work?

It's all well and good sending a text message, but an entire movie or TV show is a completely different thing. Usenet was never designed to distribute large binary files, only text, so a system was devised that converted binary files into coded text messages, distributed them across the network, and then decoded them back again.

It doesn't stop there though, to further complicate things the News Servers place a limit on the amount of lines of text that a posted message may have. The amount varies from server to server but even a 700MB movie would be far too big, so these large files are split up into several components of around 15MB in size called ‘Parts’, which together form an 'Archive'.

So in a nutshell, using a Usenet client called a newsreader, you connect to a News Server, access 'the Binaries', download all the Parts of the particular Archive that you want, which are then converted back into the original file (movie etc) ready for use.

It sounds complicated but once you know what you're doing it's a breeze, and for an overview of how to download complete Archives manually, click here.

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Newsgroups terminology & pros & cons