News Clients (formerly Usenet Newsreaders or NNTP Clients) allow access to Usenet newsgroups. Newsgroups (aka UseNet) are organized by hierarchy and include almost every conceivable topic. These message forums or discussion groups reside on thousands of Usenet servers which communicate with each other and with end users via NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol),RFC 0977 and RFC 2980. Most serious discussion takes place within the "Big 8" hierarchies (comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, and talk). In recent years, the amount of material available on Usenet has grown dramatically and continues to increase. Today, a full Usenet feed is over 2 terabytes per day, most of it from the posting of binaries. Some newsreaders are designed for downloading binaries, others are for reading text and participating in discussions, and some work well for both.
Here's our 2008 Member Choice POLL
Last year, venerable Agent lost ground, beating NewsLeecher by a single vote. This year Forte Agent retained its top position by a broader margin, beating second choice NewsLeecher by 11 votes. The top six Usenet readers from the January 2008 Poll were as follows (in order of vote count from highest to lowest):
Twenty-four additional newsreaders received from one to fourteen votes each, but taken together got 93 votes which is more than twice the top single vote getter. "None" got 24 votes, ranking a surprising 5th overall. However, some of these voters access newsgroups via the web using Google Groups or other Usenet gateway.
"Other" was deliberately omitted in an attempt to discourage the inevitable confusion between Usenet News Clients and RSS Aggregators (sometimes called "NewsReaders"). The following unlisted news clients were mentioned in comments:
This yearˇ¦s poll was multiple choice. Out of 238 participants, 290 total votes were cast indicating that a significant number of members use more than one newsreader. As some readers function only for binary downloading, and others work better for text, we suspect that users may have selected different readers for different functions.
Q: What are newsgroups?A: In a nutshell, think of newsgroups as basically text based forums or message boards on Usenet. There are literally thousands of them covering every topic imaginable. Q: I was in some newsgroup and opened a message and all I could see was gibberish, was it some kind of secret code?A: Chances are you opened up a binary message. Newsgroups are posted text messages, someone figured out a way to encode binary files into text and posted it to the newsgroup. In order to download the binary file you would need a reader that can decode the message. Q: Where can I find more information on newsgroups?A: A wealth of information can be found at the following links: An excellent introduction to newsgroup binaries for beginners is Slyck's Guide to the Newsgroups.
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by jmorlan  edited by lilhurricane
last modified: 2009-05-10 18:02:17 |
