Usenet news works by the reader first firing up a Usenet news
program, which in today's GUI world will highly likely be something like
Netscape Messenger or Microsoft's Outlook Express. There are a lot of
proven, well-designed character-based Usenet news readers, but a proper
review of the user agent software is outside the scope of this HOWTO, so
we will just assume that you are using whatever software you like. The
reader then selects a Usenet newsgroup from the hundreds or thousands of
newsgroups which are hosted by her local server, and accesses all unread
articles. These articles are displayed to her. She can then decide to
respond to some of them.
When the reader writes an article, either in response to an
existing one or as a start of a brand-new thread of discussion, her
software posts this article to the Usenet server.
The article contains a list of newsgroups into which it is to be posted.
Once it is accepted by the server, it becomes available for other users
to read and respond to. The article is automatically
expired or deleted by the server from its internal
archives based on expiry policies set in its software; the author of the
article usually can do little or nothing to control the expiry of her
articles.
A Usenet server rarely works on its own. It forms a part of
a collection of servers, which automatically exchange articles with
each other. The flow of articles from one server to another is called a
newsfeed. In a simplistic case, one can imagine a
worldwide network of servers, all configured to replicate articles with
each other, busily passing along copies across the network as soon as one
of them receives a new articles posted by a human reader. This replication
is done by powerful and fault-tolerant processes, and gives the Usenet
network its power. Your local Usenet server literally has a copy of all
current articles in all relevant newsgroups.