> Newsgroups got pretty crazy with some of the uuencoded files people would post. That’s definitely an improvement. For a while there were warez groups with mas

> Newsgroups got pretty crazy with some of the uuencoded files people would post. That’s definitely an improvement. For a while there were warez groups with massive files split across a lot of posts. I worked for a major Usenet provider for 20+ years. The mechanisms for posting large binary files essentially created a separate application layer on top of the protocol. uuencode was replaced with yEnc, and the applications built in parity checking to handle the provider problems with missing articles. Article subjects were co-opted in semi-standard ways to allow applications to combine individual articles into files, but eventually, they just started posting files of unique message IDs (NZBs) to websites or specific groups, completely bypassing the need to even look at article lists. That ended up being a requirement anyway, because some groups got so big, readers could not realistically download lists of new articles anyway. That is still the norm. Massive files are still split across 1000s of posts, and the most popular binary groups are now "dump" groups, where the only thing common about the posts is that they are binary files of some kind. What's crazy is that even though Usenet readership has declined, Usenet posting volumes have continued a very steady increase.