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From: radio-shack@tandy.com (TRS-80 Model III)
Newsgroups: alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica
Subject: NOT GETTING ALL THE PARTS??  READ THIS!
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1996 19:43:52 -0800
Organization: zNET
Lines: 84
Message-ID: <315221f5.3633985@news.znet.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sb37.znet.com
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99e/32.194

From an earlier post by Shadow:

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                   USENET 101

POSTING: When someone posts an article to their local server, it not
only is seen by other newsreader programs using that server, but
potentially many other servers.  This affiliation of news servers is
called USENET.  USENET uses the Internet, uucp and other networks to
send articles from one server to another.  USENET articles are sent
from one news server to another via a protocol that can be thought of
as inter-server e-mail.

BROADCASTING: USENET uses a flood-fill algorithm to propagate
articles.  The articles on my server are sent to my server's list of
other news servers, which do the same, etc.  USENET articles ripple
out from the originating site, then from the other receiving sites so
that the USENET 'wave front' is constantly expanding and bifurcating.

BINARY POSTINGS: Since the articles are treated like e-mail, USENET
was never meant to handle binary material.  In order to post binary
information to USENET it must first be encoded to exist in the ASCII
range of normal text.  Many encoding schemes are available, but
UUencode/UUdecode are the accepted USENET standards.  Newsreader
programs are able to detect a binary USENET posting and perform all of
the decoding for you.

MULTI-PART POSTS: Back when most e-mail handling programs were first
being designed and written, a packet large enough to handle 1000 lines
of e-mail was considered quite ample.  With many of these e-mail
programs, pieces of mail larger than 1000 lines are either mishandled,
truncated, or otherwise trashed.  This might have been okay, until we
started pumping binary information through USENET.  Most binary files
(programs, JPGs, WAVs, multimedia) are much larger than 1000 lines
when encoded.  In order to handle this situation, USENET provides that
large articles can be broken into several pieces and linked together.

Since the early days of the Internet, many of the antique mail
handlers with 1000 line limits have been replaced.  However, limits on
mail programs (daemons, in Unix) still exist.  Whether that limit has
been increased from 1000 to 4000, or 10000... it is still there.  

Many news reader programs allow you to vary the size of the articles
that make up a multi-part post.  As a general rule of thumb, the
larger the intermediate article size, the fewer USENET news servers
will get them.  A large chunk will inevitably be routed through some
antique news server or mail program which will drop it or garble it.
Multi-part posts in smaller pieces generally mean greater distribution
with fewer problems.

The intermediate articles that make up a USENET multi-part posting can
arrive on your news server in any order.  Since message routing on the
Internet is dynamic, pieces 4 and 5 of an 8 part multi-part post may
have been routed through many more machines than pieces 1,2,3,6,7,8.
Sometimes articles land on a particularly bogged down news server
between you and the originator where they are spooled (saved on disk)
until the server has enough resources to do its part of the
broadcasting.  

When faced with fragmented multi-part posts, it is always a good idea
to wait a couple of days for all the pieces to show up.  If the pieces
never do show up, you should contact the administrator of your news
server to let them know there is a problem.  Your newsadmin can
sometimes check for USENET problems upstream (logjams) and correct
them, but only if you notify them of the problem.  

Finally, it is NEVER a good idea to contact the originator of the
article to complain about missing pieces.  If the above helps you
understand some of the basics about how USENET works, you will also
understand that the originator simply puts the files on his news
server and the rest is out of his control. If you ask the originator
to check his local news server he'll always see that all of the
articles are there.

As a last resort, try other news servers.  There are free news servers
like "news.zippo.com" (or via the web, http://www.zippo.com) or you
can look for USENET shadows that archive all of USENET and allow you
to use ftp to access the files.  Most shadows do not carry much of the
binaries groups and hardly ever any of the binaries under the 'alt'
hierarchy.
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TRS-80 MODEL III