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What is the Usenet?
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What is The Usenet?
The USENET is the most popular and the most extensive collection of
bulletin boards in the world. People from all over the world share their ideas,
words, pictures, anger, etc., at such a high level that it is difficult to visualize it
unless you experience it firsthand. The Internet is a worldwide network of computers and the Usenet is a
world-wide distributed discussion system which utilizes the Internet as a highway to distribute its data.
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What are the Usenet Newsgroups?
The basic building block of Usenet is the newsgroup, which is a collection of messages with a related theme (on other networks, these would be called conferences, forums, bulletin boards or special-interest groups). There are thousands of newsgroups, each containing messages on a particular subject. Users sending Usenet messages must address each message to a particular newsgroup.
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What are Newsgroup Articles or Postings?
"Articles" or "messages" are "posted" to the Usenet newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software. These articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks making up the Internet. Some newsgroups are moderated. In these newsgroups, the articles are first sent to a moderator for approval before appearing in the newsgroup.
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What is Spamming and Crossposting?
A spam is a newsgroup article containing a subject unrelated to the subject of the newsgroup it was posted to. Spammers usually post many articles on the same subject to a number of newsgroups. Spammings often have commercial purposes. Rather than posting individual messages in each group, the Usenet allows you to post the same message in several groups at once, through a process known as cross-posting. This is a useful mechanism and cuts down on traffic especially when a large file is being posted to many groups. But spammers abuse the ability to crosspost by sending messages to newsgroups unrelated to the subject they are discussing.
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