What Is a Newsgroup Server?
Newsgroups hearken back to a very early part of the Internet called Usenet. They pre-date even the World Wide Web, though it is possible to view them via a web page. Newsgroup servers are hosting platforms where newsgroups and related messages reside. A newsgroup is like a bulletin board on a website, but one that is open to all, and which can be on any of a huge range of topics.
Other People Are Reading
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Technology
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Newsgroups and Newsgroup Servers use NNTP, which stands for Network News Transfer Protocol. A protocol is a way that computers express themselves to one another, so that they can understand each other despite running on different platforms (you might be familiar with websites using HTTP, or HyperText Transfer Protocol). NNTP allows a newsgroup server to receive, store and distribute posts to any newsgroup that the server carries.
Newsgroup Structure
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Newsgroups have hierarchically structured names such as rec.arts.sf.written. That would mean that newsgroup is in the recreation group, the arts sub-group, the sf section, and finally the written sub-section. There's no real limit to how far the hierarchy can continue, and some names are quite long and silly-sounding.
There are eight main hierarchies of newsgroups, known as the "big 8." A newsgroup server may subscribe to any or all of those. Those hierarchies are: comp.* (computers), humanities.* (arts and literature), misc.* (miscellaneous), news.* (about Usenet itself), rec.* (recreation), sci.* (science), soc.* (social), and talk.* (controversial subjects).
Another popular hierarchy is alt.*, which is for anything not covered already, or for new groups that want to test the Usenet waters.
It is important to note that not every Newsgroup server carries every newsgroup available.
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Newsgroup Servers
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A newsgroup server is a repository for all the postings to Usenet newsgroups. As Usenet is quite a big place, some servers only keep a message for a set period, such as 30 days.
Not every server collects every newsgroup. Newsgroups servers can be very variable in terms of the number of newsgroups they collect. Most ISPs have a newsgroup server of some sort, but, as Usenet is not as popular as it used to be, some ISPs are finding it not worth the time or expense to do so, and only provide access to a few newsgroups, or none at all.
Accessing Usenet Servers
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To access a newsgroup server, you must use a newsreader application and the name of your ISP's Usenet server. There are many freeware newsreaders for every operating system downloadable on the Internet, and your ISP should have details about the location of their server, which is usually a name like news.isp.com.
If your ISP does not carry a particular newsgroup, you can ask them to carry it for you, as long as it meets with their Terms and Conditions. This means it will be added to the list of newsgroups they carry, and you can subscribe to it via your newsreader.
If your ISP does not have a newsgroups server, some websites have access to particular groups and archives of posts to those groups. The website groups.google.com has a wide range of searchable Usenet archives.
Files and Newgroup Servers
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It is possible to post more than just text to Newsgroups, and one of the reasons ISPs are not very keen on Usenet is because of these "binaries" newsgroups. Users of these groups post parts of files to newsgroups which can then be reassembled by other users to gain illegal software. Many ISPs, even if they do have a newsgroup server, will not carry binaries newsgroups--both because they often carry illegal software or viruses and because they require vastly more storage space than normal text newsgroups.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit news image by Ewe Degiampietro from Fotolia.com
