<<< Back to overview

Binary files on Usenet

Why binary files are problematic on Usenet

Usenet was never thought for binary exchange, it's a discussion network. The fact that more and more people have Internet access today (and thus also Usenet access) became a problem for Usenet in the past years. They think Usenet is their private data exchange network and they don't think about the consequences of their actions. Especially high speed users are responsible for a very negative trend: They post whole CD images to Usenet, which do not only waste so much bandwidth, that many servers get into big troubles, no, they also waste so much disc space that some servers have an article retention time of 12 hours.

12 hours is of course way too little for a discussion network and their are three consequences:

1. Those who can afford it, have to buy bigger harddiscs and faster network connections. These are usually the commercial services and guess who's paying for the new equipment? Right, their customers. IOW the prices for commercial Usenet services raise permanently.

2. Those who can't afford it simply start to ban high traffic groups. While this is a solution that always works, users of those servers aren't happy about it. Many people lose access to their favorite binary Newsgroup, what causes them to move to another server. IOW the service is losing a lot of customers.

3. Since running a Usenet server without users is pretty moronic, those who lost nearly all users simply take the server off the Net...permanently! Right now servers are dying like flees, which is not only bad for the Usenet as a whole, it's also bad for users, because those are usually the FREE servers that die (either independent free servers or free Usenet servers of ISPs).

If this trend continues, we must be afraid that one day all Usenet servers will be commercial ones and then Usenet isn't a network for everyone anymore, it's a network for privileged pay-user only.

I personally can't understand most people. Not only that they cause all these problems on Usenet, they can daily convince themselves how poor Usenet is as binary network, but they don't stop posting new binaries. Every day when a bigger post is made, hundreds of people complain about missing parts, broken parts, incomplete multiposts, decoding problems, slow download rates and so on. All things that wouldn't be a problem if they had downloaded it via one of the other data transfer services of the Internet... but NO, it has to be Usenet.

Then plenty of reposts are made and those reposts suffer by the same problems than the original posts. Even worse, they waste space and bandwidth that would be needed for new posts, causing even more problems at those new posts. That leads to even more reposts and we are inside a vicious circle. But people don't even try to get out of it, they keep on posting as if everything were okay.

<<< Back to overview