If there's something that can be said about the newsgroups, it’s the relative consistency of the community. For those looking to post messages and engage in discussions, the newsgroup world today has remained largely unchanged from its origins - other than ISPs cutting off access.

The binaries are a different ball of wax. This realm of the newsgroups is consistently changing, and today's modern binary newsgroups would be unrecognizable to a binary user 10 years ago. Consider the more important changes to the binaries since the release of Napster:

yEnc - Encoding binary to text files became much more efficient and less resource hungry thanks to yEnc encoding. Since large files can't be uploaded to a news server, they must be encoded into text. yEnc's efficiency helped mitigate network overhead and bandwidth consumption by reducing the size of the encoded file.

NZB files - Developed by the indexing site Newzbin.com, NZB files eliminate the need to download entire newsgroup headers by informing the client the precise location of the archive, which further reduces network overhead.

Indexing services - Any fan of eDonkey2000 or BitTorrent is familiar with indexing services. Indexers have greatly enhanced the ability to locate files by organizing the dizzying level of information on any network, whether it's BitTorrent, eDonkey2000, or the newsgroups.

PAR files - PAR files mathematically repair missing or corrupt files in a binary archive. Before the event of PAR files, the end user had to hope an archive was complete and undamaged.

To someone only posting messages or engaging in discussion, these advancements aren't particularly important. To the binary enthusiast, they've changed the face of the newsgroups to the point where just about anyone who can point and click can get involved. But the big separator remains access to the news server, whose cost of approximately $15-$20 a month is inhibitive to some users.

However, many news readers are free. The most popular, Alt.Binz and Grabit, take advantage of all the above advancements, and many more, such as automatically repairing and assembling an archive. This later development helped convince many otherwise tepid users to hop on the newsgroup bandwagon.

Grabit has been quiet for more than a year, with a release last reported in May of 2007. Behind the sceness though, Shemes, the developer of Grabit, has been plugging away at improving his client. Over the weekend, Grabit has upgraded to version 1.7.2 beta, as observed by a forum poster on Slyck. The change may seem rather small, and most updates are more maintenance issues than anything else, however, for those concerned about their privacy, Grabit now supports encryption.