Usenet newsgroup
They are not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start developing tasks like creating Linux, sustain mailing lists and file uploading.
In the late 1980s, Usenet articles were often limited by the providers to 60,000 characters, but in time, Usenet groups have been splited in two types: text for mainly discussions, conversations, articles, limited by most providers to about 32,000 characters, and binary for file transfer, with providers setting limits ranging from less than 1 MB to about 4 MB.
Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web.
Before the adoption of the World Wide Web, Usenet newsgroups were among the most popular Internet services.
Similar to another early (yet still used) protocol SMTP which is used for email messages, NNTP allows both server-server and client-server communication.
There is no technical difference between the two, but the naming differentiation allows users and servers with limited facilities to minimize network bandwidth usage, by dropping the large size binary groups.
Historically, with telephone modems at only kilobytes transfer rates, Usenet conventions and rules were enacted to minimize the overall amount of network traffic and resource usage, but today, only the above message size hard limits imposed by the providers are respected.
Back when the early community was the pioneering computer society, the common habit seen with many posts was a notice at the end that disclosed whether the author had (or was free of) a personal interest (financial, political or otherwise) in making the post.
Usenet newsgroups posters and operators usually do not make money from their occupations on the platform.
While newsgroups were not created with the intention of distributing files such as pictures, sound and video, they have proven to be quite effective for this.
[8] Because newsgroups are widely distributed, a file uploaded once will be spread to many other servers and can then be downloaded by an unlimited number of users.
More useful is that users download from a local news server, rather than from a more distant machine with perhaps limited connectivity, as may be the case with peer-to-peer technology.
At the receiver's end, the data needed to be decoded by the user's news client.
These advances have meant that Usenet is used to send and receive many terabytes of files per day.
There are two main issues that pose problems for transmitting large files over newsgroups.
[9] A number of websites exist to keep an index of files posted to binary newsgroups.
Most Internet service providers host their own news servers, or rent access to one, for their subscribers.
For newsgroups that are not widely carried, sometimes a carrier group is used for crossposting to aid distribution.
Newsgroups are often arranged into hierarchies, theoretically making it simpler to find related groups.
Among those that the Usenet cabal (who effectively ran the Big 7 at the time) did not allow were those concerning recipes, recreational drug use, and sex.
Once the proposal has been formalized with a name, description, charter, the Big-8 Management Board will vote on whether to create the group.
