Usenet: What is it and how do I use it?

Factual Questions
1

I was probably using Usenet way-back-when, but outside of it being a simple Billboard, what is it these days?

This all got started from another thread on Mac software where these were recommended to get:

“Unison - Panic Blog » The Future of Unison (to be used with Http://www.easynews.com)”

So I looked and became confused when I saw that one is a piece of software, and the other a paid-for service that seems to duplicate the software functions to some extent. Why would I pay to use Usenet? Why do I need to pay for software?

I’ve looked at Wiki and other sites and I am probably more confused than when I started. What all can I use Usenet for? I don’t know if it is simply a place to find news stories, or other message boards-type discussions or if it is used to download pr0n and illegal MP3s…

Do I have to purchase a program to use it? Do certain programs only allow you to use certain parts? Like only text areas, or only graphics or ???

Sorry, but I find that with some things on the Net, the descriptions are along the lines of “Water is wet, duh!” and I feel lost.

-Tcat

2

You would do this because Usenet is absolutely stuffed with…stuff. Message threads like the SDMB, porn, legal files, illegal files.

If you were to pay your $15 a month for any of a number of Usenet servers, you could use some certain software to download all the binaries in a particular set of newsgroups.

So, some horrid people that Comcast eventually calls up and threatens can find themselves downloading at 6Mbit/second 24/7. Because those Usenet servers have a much bigger pipe than you have, you will be utilizing all your bandwidth.

So, in a day you would download approximately 64.8GB per day, or 1.944TB in a 30 day month…

-Joe

3

Sorry, but you just told me water is wet…

Comcast? What’s that? OK, just looked…you are making a joke about a salesperson selling me unlimited access to the Net…I guess. And that I would then be able to use all my bandwidth all day getting whatever my heart desires.

So you can only access Usenet using a paid-for service? Or is it that the paid-for service just makes it easier to organize it? I guess I’m confused because…take email, for example. I can use a free Yahoo! email account and use it just fine and dandy. If I want, I can upgrade and pay for added spam protection, POP3 transfer, etc. But Usenet seems to be you can have free access, but, really, you should get a piece of software (like Yahoo! for email) AND pay for the ability to get stuff (like receiving email with Yahoo!). But then some literature says I don’t need all that stuff.

So why should I pay for software to access and servers to access it? Do these things make it soooooo much easier? Are there free alternatives for the software AND/OR the access?

-Tcat

4

Most ISPs have Usenet servers for their customers, but they are usually terrible. They will have poor retention times for posts, some posts will be missing entirely and entire groups will be missing (especially the ones with “interesting” content). They are also often very slow. The news reader that comes with Outlook Express is terrible. Others (I use Agent, but there are plenty of otherrs) are much more flexible.

5

http://isp.webopedia.com/TERM/U/USENET.html

Most ISPs provide a NNTP ( News ) server, you can also use Google Groups.

Microsoft Outlook is a News reader - personally I like Free Agent

  • there are plenty of free News readers out there

I can’t possibly think why anyone would pay $11.95 per month to have access to old style bulletin boards that they can normally get at for free.
This site has quite a list of free and public NNTP servers, but your ISP should provide one anyway

Incidentally, my understanding is that a lot of NGs and News Servers don’t like binaries.

News Groups are very old technology, and extremely interesting

  • that site you posted seems to be selling a News reader with the major advantage that you can set up multiple identities, which is a bit silly as one can spot that by looking at the IP of the poster.
6

You can access Usenet for free in several ways - through Google Groups, or through your ISPs news server (if they have one), for instance. This is fine if you are primarily interested in discussion newsgroups such as alt.fan.cecil-adams.

However, Google does not archive binaries groups, and I’m pretty sure most ISP’s don’t on their own news server. The binary groups contain all the “images” and “movies” nudge nudge wink wink. This is what you are paying Easynews for. Another advantage of a paid-for service is that they will retain files on their servers much longer than free ones. Note that Google doesn’t delete.

7

Incidentally, for keeping current with an NG use a News reader

For searching archives use Google Groups - it is great for searching, but a pig for posting.

8

OK…failed miserably.

I downloaded Thunderbird from Mozilla.

I tried to find files to download. Stop the wink wink, I looked for free ebooks to read. I thought I’d be able to get a classic or three to read.

Nothing. Subscribed to a few newsgroups and had a warning that said “Download only the first 500?” I said YES and got 5 emails/threads/??? that were for meeting people in my area and software for video editting.

WTF?

-Tcat

9

My advice to the OP, for what it’s worth, is to get and install a free newsreader (best not to use Outlook Express, although many do) such as Free Agent for Windows. Check with your ISP for their news feed facilities and configuration (aka “NNTP”, aka “Usenet”) and spend a few minutes playing about.

Configuration is a doddle - you just need the name of an NNTP server (most ISPs have something like nntp.myisp.news, even if they don’t host it themselves), possibly with a username/password combination. In many cases, if you’re using your ISP’s feed, you don’t need the latter, since simply being connected to your ISP is validation enough.

Once you’ve got that set up, the first step is to download a list of newsgroups into your newsreader. There are many thousands of groups, mostly inactive. Once you’ve got the list, you’re free to browse around and read messages. Finding a group dealing with an interest of yours can be a little fiddly, since the naming conventions are quite odd.

You might want to look at alt.fan.cecil-adams, as Struan points out. If you like the SDMB, you’ll probably enjoy this one, since it’s a bunch of clever people (and the usual handful of idiots) with similar interests to the people here. Fighting ignorance, all that - a ragbag collection of threads on all sorts of topics.

Without knowing more about what interests you, it’s hard to recommend anything more specific than that, but you’ll probably be surprised at the diversity of special interest groups. Have a thick skin, because there is a lot of rubbish out there, but time spent sieving through all that is time well spent. Expect a lot of very good tech support groups, loads of humour, a fair spread of regional and non-English-language groups, sex, health, conspiracy theories, computer gaming, well, something for everyone.

If you find a group interesting, your newsreader will have a ‘subscribe’ function. All this means is that you’re telling your newsreader to keep that group up to date; in reality, you’re not subscribing to anything.

Lurk at first, until you’re comfortable with the customs and practices of each group. Before your first post, subscribe to alt.test and make a post there. Then check to see if your post comes through. No-one really uses alt.test for any other purpose than to check their own posting setup - that’s why it’s there.

All of this is free. You only need to pay for anything if you want to take it much further, and have access to binaries, or a more fully-fledged newsreader.

Simultaneous posting means additional feedback:

You’re ahead of me, it seems.

Thunderbird’s OK - I’m not a fan myself, but plenty of people use it. Don’t restrict yourself to the first 500 unless you’re on pay-per-minute dialup or something - the headers are tiny. I generally get all available messages for a group I’m subscribing to, even if it takes a few minutes.

If you find inactive groups (as you seem to have done), move on and look elsewhere. Most groups only get spam and rubbish, but the gems are there. Trial and error (and a bit of Googling) should get you what you want. A good idea is to search in the “Groups” part of Google, using keywords indicating your interest. This will show you the history of relevant Usenet posts, from which you can get an idea of which groups might suit your purposes.

Good luck!

10

Usenet was like the big ultimate BBS before the web. It covered so many topics that you had to individually sign up for and track each (like subscribing to GQ or IMHO.)

Generally the names of the forums are all you need to know to figure out whether you’d be interested or not, but there is (or at least was) thousands, so that can take a bit of work.

Overall, the whole thing used to work through email, so don’t get too carried away with a fancy browser just for Usenet.

Personally I would say that unless you’re a programmer/techy, it’s not worth hastle. The only forums that aren’t junk are techy boards where the “old timers” who don’t like all this new-fangled internet BBS technology hang out. But of course, the old timers know a lot of arcane stuff, so if you want to learn it…

comp.lang.c is probably the largest congragation of cranky people outside of GD (but I’ll stick with GD, as at least the debates are a bit more relevant to life.) :slight_smile:

11

OK, help me a bit more…

How do I get a text file of ‘Frankenstein’? (I am assuming it is free to download since it is so old). Or ‘Moby Dick’ or ???

If you walk me through that, I’m sure I’d be able to figure out how to download vertically-challenged-on-vertically-challenged-same-sex-boat-sailing videos (dwarf-on-dwarf all-female sailboating). Insert tongue-in-cheek-smiley here.

-Tcat

12

You could avoid Usenet completely and use Project Gutenberg.

13

They’ve got dwarf pr0n there?!? Wow!

:wink:
Tcat

14

Downloading files from Usenet really depend on how they were uploaded.

If it’s a plain txt file, then you click on the post and the file appears on screen. Big files though are going to be compressed and probably split into multiple parts. You’ll need yet more software to combine and unzip them.

15

Barrington nailed it.

Usenet is one of the original Internet services and predates the web. Like all of life there is much dross, but for the willing, there are also many gems and for the savvy, the dross is pretty easily avoided. Newsreaders have filters.

E-books are binaries. I’ll be home late tonight and I’ll be happy to find you the names of e-book groups. Binary groups post tons of data and they are the ones most likely to require a pay service to get any sort of decent retention and completeness. E-books will be multipart postings, usually as pars and usually nowdays in yenc. Par you’ll need to understand, yenc not so much. The only thing you need to know about yenc is that your newsreader needs to be able to deal with it. Forget Thunderbird and get Xnews. It automatically handles yenc and makes dealing with multipart postings a snap. It’s free.

Intstall it and give it your news server address and let it download the groups listing. One gauge of your news server is how many groups you find. A premium server will have from 50,000 to 100,000 groups. Then use the search function to find the group names you want and subscribe to those groups by clicking on the button to the left of the group name. Then you can click on the “All” button at bottom left (it will be down and you’ll be putting it up) and your view will switch to only those groups you are subscribed to. Gets the trash out of sight. Double click a group and it will switch to a screen for only that group. Small groups will just start coming in. Larger groups (like most binaries) will promp you for how many headers you want. You’ll need to get some experience to determine how many headers you want. I have 2 gigs of RAM and all the headers in a big binary group on a premium server can swamp my systems ability to deal with them, so judge from there. For a start, I recommend you set the top slider no more than one quarter of the way to the left. This is because binaries are a different beast than text only groups. I won’t go into why RAM is an issue, just trust me that it is. With a decent system on a free server with crappy retention, all the headers could easily be no problem. It really doesn’t matter at this point, because all you want to do is test the waters and you’ll only need a hundred headers or so to do that, so start small. You can expand later if necessary.

Once the group has loaded, you’ll see the headers. Multipart postings have different symbols from single part postings. Single part postings can be opened in Xnews with a double click. Multipart postings will need to be downloaded and reassembled. So the norm is for a poster to post a single part message telling about his post. The name of the book and all that and often information about the posting like how many parts it has and total size and all that. That info post will be followed by the multipart post that is the actual book data. Here’s where you’ll find out immediately if your news server is up to snuff. Look at the data posts. If the symbol is a light blue cube, it is complete. If the symbol is a dark blue broken cube, it is not complete. If a large number of the cubes for a given book are broken, you’re done. Your news server is crap and there is no point in going further. If all the cubes are light blue, or if only a few cubes are broken, you’re good to go. The reason people post in par format is that broken parts can be fixed, but there is a limit and most guys post 10% recovery pars so you’ll need 90% of the parts to be complete to get a successful download.

I’d go on, but on a free news server, there is only a pretty small chance that you’ll get all the parts to a big binary posting. It is worth a try, and after seeing what is available (seeing how many and what sorts of books you find) you might decide that a pay service is worth it (I use newshosting). Expect to pay between $10 and $20 per month.

Download Xnews

Xnews Primer

This all sounds way more complicated than it actually is. If you’re any good at all with computers, you’ll sort it out quickly. The gist of the matter is that if you’re into data (books, music, pictures, video, etc.) Usenet has it all in an abundance that makes all other sources look like child’s play.

16

OK, getting closer to the crux of the matter…

So, what you are saying is that I can find a bunch of free stuff on the Usenet through various means. BUT, if I want a copy of ‘A French Leiutenants(sp?) Woman’ fast and easy (outside of gutenberg), then I should subscribe to a pay service. Otherwise put, I could just pay for the ease of typing in “ebook, frankenstein” into some program and within moments I’d get a txt file downloading?

-Tcat

17

It’d be nice if it was that easy. :wink:

Fact of the matter is that the only way Frankenstein will be there is if someone out there has posted to Usenet Frankenstein any time within your news server’s retention time.

-Joe

18

See, this is the stuff that people tend to leave out of their explanations…oh, I thought you knew water was wet!

So Usenet is only made up of recent postings? Do they reside on different servers, thus the need to subscribe to different sites? Is this a crude analogy: To get email from Yahoo! you must be registered to Yahoo!, and to get email from Hotmail, you must be registered there too. And all emails get deleted after a couple months.

And to get any pictures or software or files, they must be part of a posting? They don’t just reside somewhere as “frankenstein.txt”, but they are in someone’s posting of “Hey, here’s M. Shelly’s Frankenstein, pt I…pt II to follow in the next posting.”

Is it me, or is it OK to be confused about this thing?

-Tcat

19

It’s OK to be confused, don’t worry.

Firstly, the issue of servers. There are many, many servers scattered throughout the world on different networks. But … and here’s the good bit … aside from a few, specialist proprietary servers, they’re all linked. You post “hello” in alt.test from your ISP’s news feed, and there’s a good chance that it’ll be picked up from any other standard server network anywhere else in the world. Usenet would barely exist if this cross-feeding didn’t happen. The technical term (more or less) is ‘propagation’.

Now, it seems like you’re primarily interested in downloading files, rather than using Usenet as a medium for discussion. You will probably need to pay extra these days for a newsfeed (ie access to a server network) that caters for that; like email, Usenet is mainly a text medium, notwithstanding the many (and quite marvellous) technologies such as PAR and yENC that have made it a viable method of transmitting binaries between members of online communities.

This is where this discussion must come to a halt (IMVHO - I’m new here, and bow before longer-served Dopers), because the vast majority of the binary traffic on Usenet is illegal for copyright reasons and others. As such, I believe it would violate the SDMB charter to discuss this sort of thing beyond a vague description. I won’t discuss binaries further unless we’re clear on the legality.

Don’t give up on Usenet itself, though. It’s a wonderful way of finding out all sorts of stuff just at the level of discussion, debate, and queries and their answers. On many subjects, it’s my primary method of finding solutions to specific problems through dialogue, and as such is easily more productive than the web.

Briefly back to the time issue, most Usenet discussion groups operate in a window of time perhaps a week or two old - custom within each group tends to dictate that time period. Technically, you can resurrect threads from years ago (my current feed goes back to early 2004, which is unusual), but protocol usually dictates that anything that old deserves a new thread rather than a direct reply.

I’m happy to answer any questions about Usenet (aka NNTP, aka newsgroups) as long as there is no question of the legality of what you’re trying to achieve - not that I’m accusing you of anything, just being careful here.

20

There is no official retention time for the Usenet. There are thousands of copies of the Usenet on Usenet servers all over the world. It’s probably the most decentralized thing known to man. So the retention time depends on the service you’re using. If it’s a free service, or you’re using your ISPs Usenet server, then the retention time will probably be a few days. A pay service will be much longer.

And seriously, the Usenet isn’t very good for looking up specific files. It’s more along the line of “Let’s see if there’s anything I can use.” You’re better off using a bit torrent client.

Here’s an interesting report from back in the old days about the Usenet. What they’re actually talking about when the reporter says “Internet” is the Usenet (They don’t mention binary files though). This was before the WWW.