User:Imran~enwikibooks/tempusenet

What is Usenet ?

If your familiar with mailing lists or web-based forum, then the general principle of Usenet is simple so you may just want to skim over this first section.

To explain what Usenet is, I'll try and make analogies with real-life that most people are familiar with. Imagine Usenet as a pin-up board, where anyone can come along and stick a message up, people can then come by read the original message and attach a reply to the board, and then someone els can come along and look at the messages written, and if they want add their own message.

In a basic view that's all that Usenet is, an exchange point for messages.

Now imagine that about 25 million people were reading and writing messages for this pin-board, with one pin-board it would get overcrowded very quickly, the obvious solution is to have more pin-boards, say one for every topic

The technically correct name for Usenet's pin-boards is "newsgroups", currently there are approximately 25,000 active(active meaning in-use) newsgroups, with overall somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 that currently are dead (dead meaning they are not in use currently).

Returning to our pin-board analogy, it would be very busy if all 25 million users were in the same area, so instead we have replicas created, meaning there are copies of these pin-boards all over the world.

(From now on I'll be calling the pin-boards "newsgroups" as that's the most commonly used term)

I'll introduce some more terminology here, as it makes the explaination go easier later.

News server = These are the places where copies of the newsgroups are held, there is no central news server from where all copies are held, but rather