The Newsgroups are a special part of the internet that pre-dates the World Wide Web. Once upon a time when the internet was still young there were special interest groups that shared information and kept in touch by using a bulletin board type system. This system was designed to take advantage of the internet in a way an old BBS couldn't : each location had a machine (news server) that would store all the messages of the newsgroups that were desired by it's users. Periodically these servers connect to each other and exchange all messages that are missing on either server. In this manner, a message sent by any user would eventually get distributed to every server that carried that newsgroup.

A short time passed and the users of certain newsgroups thought that this system would be ideal to share files with each other. However, the newsgroups were not designed to transfer binary files - they can only transfer text files. Stuck!! NO. How about this: Take a binary file and convert it (encode it) so that it is now a text message. Distribute that text message through the newsgroup and then whoever wants the file can download that message and convert it back (decode it) into the original binary file.

Sounds Great! And there began file sharing using the newsgroups. The newsgroups still operate in almost the same way. Luckily, there have been great improvements in the software used to download the messages from the news server to your computer that makes getting files from the newsgroups today 1000 times easier than it was when this system first appeared.

Unfortunately, unless you are familiar with them, navigating and downloading files from the newsgroups takes a good deal more effort than using BT or eDonkey. A typical download from the newsgroups will require more steps than other methods because a large file is usually split into many pieces in the following way:

The reason this is all necessary is that many news servers will not accept messages that are longer than 10,000 lines, many even less than that. A 700 MB movie would take around 15 Million lines if it were encoded into one message -- way too much for any news server to accept. The reason for the first split into rar files is a matter of the nature of the newsgroups : some messages don't make it. For one reason or another messages don't always get to every server. A large file is split up to minimize the time/bandwidth needed to recover from a missing/bad message. So in our example above, if a message doesn't make it for part movie.r08 it would only be necessary to find and download that piece rather than the whole thing if it were all one file. PAR files have emerged making the argument for splitting into rar files even stronger. Luckily for music fans, most mp3's are not split the first time, so downloading them is easy as pie!

Additional newsgroup confusion arises from the listing of groups that can be hard to distinguish which messages are the files you need amongst all the other messages that are not files but actual text messages.

So is it worth it? You better believe it! The newsgroups are an awesome resource. If you're not using them and are ready to kick it up a level check them out. You won't believe your eyes!