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An important part about usegroups is that it is from an era of dial-in connections. One can dial into your ISP, sync News (fetch new messages in groups one is

An important part about usegroups is that it is from an era of dial-in connections. One can dial into your ISP, sync News (fetch new messages in groups one is subscribed to and send messages) and then go offline and read/answer the messages without paying per minute and without blocking ports for other dial-in customers. This also worked between different news servers in distinct networks with unreliable connections. For the how paid: In some regions it was part of the things a "good" ISP had to offer their clients. Also back in the days™ large parts of the internet was run on machines in some university labs.

bonoboTP 6y ago
I see. It seems somewhat like mailing lists to me. I go online, my client sends and receives messages depending on which groups I'm subscribed to, and messages bounce around in a distributed fashion, somewhat like emails bouncing between SMTP servers. I still don't quite get the user experience. What if you're subscribed to alt.binaries? Do you then sync all the binaries when you go online? That wouldn't make sense. Perhaps it only synchronizes on a level below that, alt.binaries.something.something? But that may still be too much. And what if my ISP's server didn't have the newsgroup I was interested in? Is it like DNS, where it would then fetch it from somewhere else and then cache it? Or did most servers store the entire data? Or an ISP would just store the messages that at least one of their customers subscribe to?
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  Yes, it is related to mail, but with open groups. Country to mailing list you have the complete archive. In a way a world readable impact server with append permissions (well, actually there are ways to pull old messages back etc.) and synchronisation between servers. (Not correct comparison, but maybe helps) The individual messages are also structured like mail using MIME. For what you download in sync depends on your config. alt.binaries is special, I believe relatively young and many providers didn't offer them to begin with ... When fetching you configured your client "please fetch all of comp.lang.cpp" and it would do. I believe you could also say "just give me the headers" and load only selected messages on next sync (i.e. for fetching only binaries from messages with interesting subjects) If your ISP didn't have a server, there were multiple open ones in universities or other ISPs (not all locked down for their customers only but either didn't care or saw it as an ad for them), but they could be far away (modern cross ocean cables are younger ...) and busy/slow. And yes, a server can decide which groups it syncs.
- jdeibele 6y ago
  You would (typically) have a dumb terminal experience. You'd use your computer and modem to log into a remote system. You would use a newsreader to browse newsgroups. If there was something that you wanted, like binaries, they would be saved on the remote system. You'd then need to ftp them from that system to your own. If you were one of the fortunate ones to have a hard-wired connection, well, that happened a lot faster. Newsreaders were awesome for reading newsgroups. You were able to add someone or a topic to a kill file for one group or all groups. As binaries got bigger and bigger, the retention time for them on the remote system got shorter and shorter. You might have 7 days of binaries and 90 days of everything else. For a while some forum software would be accessible via NNTP which was awesome. It let more people use the forums but gave more experienced users much better tools.
- gwittel 6y ago
  Sort of like mailing lists with a dedicated client so you can see everything in nice threaded fashion. You could explore new groups through the client as well. I never found the web based Usenet mirrors comparable to a dedicated client. Typically you synced the equivalent of headers and bodies separately (for the groups you were interested in). This way you only grabbed what you wanted. For binary groups, people settled on patterns in subjects, etc so that clients could automate downloading of files (binaries had to be encoded and split into parts due to post length limits). On regular text type newsgroups you might set your client to download headers+bodies in one shot for offline mode. With offline mode you would then just download what's new vs your cache. Then work against your local cache for reading/replying. Once online again, your batched replies could be sent. If your ISP didn't have the newsgroup you wanted, you would have to point to another NTTP server. For a while there were public ones that anyone could use. Over time, those public ones went away or dropped problematic areas like alt.binaries.*. These days Usenet is available as a for-pay service.
- acdha 6y ago
  You'd subscribe to specific groups and many clients were smart enough to do varying levels of selective sync: fetch all of the message headers but not the bodies over a certain size, only messages matching certain patterns, etc. It was definitely high-volume and could have been risky — imagine if the predecessors to e.g. 4chan decided to cross-post illegal content to a channel. This was also where the term “spam” really got popularized (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...) so many things which we now take for granted were being tried at scale for the first time there. There was a [relatively weak] moderation system which could be used to restrict posting and there were bots which would retroactively cancel messages so you might not see so much junk if a group used such a bot and ruthlessly nuked spam. Regarding ISPs, in many cases it worked like your last case: start storing anything that at least one client has asked for recently. This was a notorious source of disk space consumption if you ran a low-capacity server and then had someone fire up a client, request the world, and then stop reading it but your system was still downloading everything.
- indymike 6y ago
  Mailing lists were many times archived to a usenet newsgroup. The user experience was like a big, threaded email box. You would download headers and a few KB of the text part of the message, and then select the binaries you wanted and your client would download the full message and decode them. Really not too different than a pop or imap email client. If your ISP didn't have the newsgroups you wanted, there were many open usenet servers and paid services as well. Groups were not really a hierarchy. You could only subscribe to groups that had messages. Dot paths were used to make them make sense to humans.
- nl 6y ago
  Your client could sync the headers and the request individual messages as needed. But yes, your newsgroup provider had to have all the messages you wanted to see. That's one of the reasons ISPs stopped offering them - they'd have to have the infrastructure for all of their customers to support something that perhaps only one person would actually read. Universities would often not carry the complete alt.* heirachy for example (especially in later, post 2000 years where the binary groups started getting big).
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > What if you're subscribed to alt.binaries? Do you then sync all the binaries when you go online? Yes. Your news reader (nee aggregator) would use the NNTP protocol to tell the server "please give me a list of articles in groups X, Y, and Z". Your reader would know you read up to article 234 in a group previously, but now there were 266, so there were 32 new ones. You'd tell the reader UI to go into that group, which would cause it to download the new articles (headers) and display them to you. If you saw a particular thread you liked you'd select that and the body of the article(s) would be downloaded. If you wanted to do offline reading there was a file format call SOUP which would allow you to download it to your local machine (remember, this was often in the age of dial-up). There is no article on SOUP, but a similar idea was QWK for BBSes: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) To distribute articles/posts globally an NNTP server would talk to other NNTP servers: technically peer-to-peer was/is possible, but it was often hierarchical. One could also have site/local-only groups and global groups.

bonoboTP 6y ago

I see. It seems somewhat like mailing lists to me. I go online, my client sends and receives messages depending on which groups I'm subscribed to, and messages bounce around in a distributed fashion, somewhat like emails bouncing between SMTP servers. I still don't quite get the user experience. What if you're subscribed to alt.binaries? Do you then sync all the binaries when you go online? That wouldn't make sense. Perhaps it only synchronizes on a level below that, alt.binaries.something.something? But that may still be too much. And what if my ISP's server didn't have the newsgroup I was interested in? Is it like DNS, where it would then fetch it from somewhere else and then cache it? Or did most servers store the entire data? Or an ISP would just store the messages that at least one of their customers subscribe to?

johannes1234321 6y ago
Yes, it is related to mail, but with open groups. Country to mailing list you have the complete archive. In a way a world readable impact server with append permissions (well, actually there are ways to pull old messages back etc.) and synchronisation between servers. (Not correct comparison, but maybe helps) The individual messages are also structured like mail using MIME. For what you download in sync depends on your config. alt.binaries is special, I believe relatively young and many providers didn't offer them to begin with ... When fetching you configured your client "please fetch all of comp.lang.cpp" and it would do. I believe you could also say "just give me the headers" and load only selected messages on next sync (i.e. for fetching only binaries from messages with interesting subjects) If your ISP didn't have a server, there were multiple open ones in universities or other ISPs (not all locked down for their customers only but either didn't care or saw it as an ad for them), but they could be far away (modern cross ocean cables are younger ...) and busy/slow. And yes, a server can decide which groups it syncs.
jdeibele 6y ago
You would (typically) have a dumb terminal experience. You'd use your computer and modem to log into a remote system. You would use a newsreader to browse newsgroups. If there was something that you wanted, like binaries, they would be saved on the remote system. You'd then need to ftp them from that system to your own. If you were one of the fortunate ones to have a hard-wired connection, well, that happened a lot faster. Newsreaders were awesome for reading newsgroups. You were able to add someone or a topic to a kill file for one group or all groups. As binaries got bigger and bigger, the retention time for them on the remote system got shorter and shorter. You might have 7 days of binaries and 90 days of everything else. For a while some forum software would be accessible via NNTP which was awesome. It let more people use the forums but gave more experienced users much better tools.
gwittel 6y ago
Sort of like mailing lists with a dedicated client so you can see everything in nice threaded fashion. You could explore new groups through the client as well. I never found the web based Usenet mirrors comparable to a dedicated client. Typically you synced the equivalent of headers and bodies separately (for the groups you were interested in). This way you only grabbed what you wanted. For binary groups, people settled on patterns in subjects, etc so that clients could automate downloading of files (binaries had to be encoded and split into parts due to post length limits). On regular text type newsgroups you might set your client to download headers+bodies in one shot for offline mode. With offline mode you would then just download what's new vs your cache. Then work against your local cache for reading/replying. Once online again, your batched replies could be sent. If your ISP didn't have the newsgroup you wanted, you would have to point to another NTTP server. For a while there were public ones that anyone could use. Over time, those public ones went away or dropped problematic areas like alt.binaries.*. These days Usenet is available as a for-pay service.
acdha 6y ago
You'd subscribe to specific groups and many clients were smart enough to do varying levels of selective sync: fetch all of the message headers but not the bodies over a certain size, only messages matching certain patterns, etc. It was definitely high-volume and could have been risky — imagine if the predecessors to e.g. 4chan decided to cross-post illegal content to a channel. This was also where the term “spam” really got popularized (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...) so many things which we now take for granted were being tried at scale for the first time there. There was a [relatively weak] moderation system which could be used to restrict posting and there were bots which would retroactively cancel messages so you might not see so much junk if a group used such a bot and ruthlessly nuked spam. Regarding ISPs, in many cases it worked like your last case: start storing anything that at least one client has asked for recently. This was a notorious source of disk space consumption if you ran a low-capacity server and then had someone fire up a client, request the world, and then stop reading it but your system was still downloading everything.
indymike 6y ago
Mailing lists were many times archived to a usenet newsgroup. The user experience was like a big, threaded email box. You would download headers and a few KB of the text part of the message, and then select the binaries you wanted and your client would download the full message and decode them. Really not too different than a pop or imap email client. If your ISP didn't have the newsgroups you wanted, there were many open usenet servers and paid services as well. Groups were not really a hierarchy. You could only subscribe to groups that had messages. Dot paths were used to make them make sense to humans.
nl 6y ago
Your client could sync the headers and the request individual messages as needed. But yes, your newsgroup provider had to have all the messages you wanted to see. That's one of the reasons ISPs stopped offering them - they'd have to have the infrastructure for all of their customers to support something that perhaps only one person would actually read. Universities would often not carry the complete alt.* heirachy for example (especially in later, post 2000 years where the binary groups started getting big).
throw0101a 6y ago
> What if you're subscribed to alt.binaries? Do you then sync all the binaries when you go online? Yes. Your news reader (nee aggregator) would use the NNTP protocol to tell the server "please give me a list of articles in groups X, Y, and Z". Your reader would know you read up to article 234 in a group previously, but now there were 266, so there were 32 new ones. You'd tell the reader UI to go into that group, which would cause it to download the new articles (headers) and display them to you. If you saw a particular thread you liked you'd select that and the body of the article(s) would be downloaded. If you wanted to do offline reading there was a file format call SOUP which would allow you to download it to your local machine (remember, this was often in the age of dial-up). There is no article on SOUP, but a similar idea was QWK for BBSes: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) To distribute articles/posts globally an NNTP server would talk to other NNTP servers: technically peer-to-peer was/is possible, but it was often hierarchical. One could also have site/local-only groups and global groups.