What is a Newsgroup?

A newsgroup is a repository for messages posted from millions of different users from all over the world. Newsgroups are very similar to discussion groups / forums, but they are entirely public and do not require any kind of login or personal information in order for you to browse through them. Some newsgroups are moderated, but these are clearly defined and this only applies to writing (posting) in the group, not reading.

Because newsgroups are syncronised all over the world on thousands of different usenet servers, you do not have to worry about a simple site fault losing all the postings or having to search through millions of sites for the forum which meets your topic.

Newsgroups basically come in two types, text newsgroups and binary newsgroups.

Usenet Indexing of Text Newsgroups is useful so that you can download a single file which could contain thousands of related articles or an entire thread on a given topic.

The Indexing of Binary Newsgroups is especially useful, as a binary post can stretch between hundreds and in some cases, thousands of articles. The indexing services make it extremely easy as you only have to worry about one article and the indexing service will find the rest, ensuring that your single file would contain all of the articles for a complete file / image of whatever you are trying to download.