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66-571: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database calls it a "slightly connected series of stories" but it was ranked number 16 of 33 "All Time Best Fantasy Novels" by Locus in 1987, based on a poll of subscribers. Similarly, it was one of five finalists for the Best Novel "Retro Hugo" in 2001 when the World Science Fiction Society provided 50th anniversary recognition for a publication year without Hugo Awards . All stories are original to

132-465: A bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded , as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially. A major difference between a BBS or web message board and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator or hosting provider. Usenet is distributed among

198-588: A charter, a rationale, and a moderation policy if the group is to be moderated. Discussion of the new newsgroup proposal follows, and is finished with the members of the Big-8 Management Board making the decision, by vote, to either approve or disapprove the new newsgroup. Unmoderated newsgroups form the majority of Usenet newsgroups, and messages submitted by readers for unmoderated newsgroups are immediately propagated for everyone to see. Minimal editorial content filtering vs propagation speed form one crux of

264-433: A commercial hosting service in 2008. On 27 February 2005, the database and the underlying code became available under Creative Commons licensing . ISFDB was originally edited by a limited number of people, principally Al von Ruff and Ahasuerus. Editing was opened in 2006 to the general public on an open content basis, with changed content being approved by one of a limited number of moderators in an attempt to protect

330-603: A cross post to the *.answers group at the head of the hierarchy seen by some as a refining of information in that news group. Some subgroups are recursive—to the point of some silliness in alt.* . Usenet was originally created to distribute text content encoded in the 7- bit ASCII character set. With the help of programs that encode 8-bit values into ASCII, it became practical to distribute binary files as content. Binary posts, due to their size and often-dubious copyright status, were in time restricted to specific newsgroups, making it easier for administrators to allow or disallow

396-454: A disproportionately high volume of customer support incidents (frequently complaining of missing news articles). Some ISPs outsource news operations to specialist sites, which will usually appear to a user as though the ISP itself runs the server. Many of these sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a limited number of newsgroups. Commonly omitted from such a newsfeed are foreign-language newsgroups and

462-438: A handful of spells, they also have to rely on relics and their other talents for protection. There are only one hundred spells which are still known to mankind, of thousands which were discovered over the course of history. Pandelume implies that "magic" has a scientific origin ; many spells were invented through the use of mathematics . Regardless of this, it appears that purely supernatural powers exist as well. The Dying Earth

528-454: A large, constantly changing set of news servers that store and forward messages to one another via "news feeds". Individual users may read messages from and post to a local (or simply preferred) news server, which can be operated by anyone, and those posts will automatically be forwarded to any other news servers peered with the local one, while the local server will receive any news its peers have that it currently lacks. This results in

594-573: A moderator must bear the Approved: header line. Moderators ensure that the messages that readers see in the newsgroup conform to the charter of the newsgroup, though they are not required to follow any such rules or guidelines. Typically, moderators are appointed in the proposal for the newsgroup, and changes of moderators follow a succession plan. Historically, a mod.* hierarchy existed before Usenet reorganization. Now, moderated newsgroups may appear in any hierarchy, typically with .moderated added to

660-682: A newsgroup under the Big Eight which contains discussions about children's books, but a group in the alt hierarchy may be dedicated to one specific author of children's books. Binaries are posted in alt.binaries.* , making it the largest of all the hierarchies. Many other hierarchies of newsgroups are distributed alongside these. Regional and language-specific hierarchies such as japan.* , malta.* and ne.* serve specific countries and regions such as Japan , Malta and New England . Companies and projects administer their own hierarchies to discuss their products and offer community technical support, such as

726-412: A readership which is potentially widely distributed. These protocols most commonly use a flooding algorithm which propagates copies throughout a network of participating servers. Whenever a message reaches a server, that server forwards the message to all its network neighbors that haven't yet seen the article. Only one copy of a message is stored per server, and each server makes it available on demand to

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792-442: A server without high-capacity data storage may refuse to carry any newsgroups used primarily for file sharing , limiting itself to discussion-oriented groups. However, unlike BBSes and web forums, the dispersed nature of Usenet usually permits users who are interested in receiving some content to access it simply by choosing to connect to news servers that carry the feeds they want. Usenet is culturally and historically significant in

858-498: A special committee award to ISFDB during their opening ceremonies on 1 September 2022. As a real-world example of a non-trivial database, the schema and MySQL files from ISFDB have been used in a number of tutorials. Schema and data from the site were used throughout Chapter 9 of the book Rails For Java Developers . It was also used in a series of tutorials by Lucid Imagination on Solr , an enterprise search platform. As of September 2013 , Quantcast estimates that ISFDB

924-457: A takedown petition to be most effective across the whole network, it would have to be issued to the origin server to which the content has been posted, before it has been propagated to other servers. Removal of the content at this early stage would prevent further propagation, but with modern high speed links, content can be propagated as fast as it arrives, allowing no time for content review and takedown issuance by copyright holders. Establishing

990-513: A telecommunications service, and assert that they are not responsible for the user-posted binary content transferred via their equipment. In the United States, Usenet providers can qualify for protection under the DMCA Safe Harbor regulations , provided that they establish a mechanism to comply with and respond to takedown notices from copyright holders. Removal of copyrighted content from

1056-418: A tree-like form. When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user's news server. Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its "newsfeeds") and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server and should eventually reach every server in the network. The later peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle, but for Usenet it

1122-1014: A wiki that allows the database editors to coordinate with each other. As of April 2022, the site had catalogued 2,002,324 story titles from 232,816 authors. The code for the site has been used in books and tutorials as examples of database schema and organizing content. The ISFDB database and code are available under Creative Commons licensing . The site won the Wooden Rocket Award in the Best Directory Site category in 2005. The ISFDB database indexes speculative fiction ( science fiction , fantasy , horror , and alternate history ) authors, novels, short fiction, essays, publishers, awards, and magazines in print, electronic, and audio formats. It supports author pseudonyms, series, and cover art plus interior illustration credits, which are combined into integrated author, artist, and publisher bibliographies with brief biographical data. An ongoing effort

1188-426: Is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts , and collectively termed news ) to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups . Usenet resembles

1254-405: Is also used by individual users to store backup data. While commercial providers offer easier to use online backup services , storing data on Usenet is free of charge (although access to Usenet itself may not be). The method requires the uploader to cede control over the distribution of the data; the files are automatically disseminated to all Usenet providers exchanging data for the news group it

1320-403: Is contained within nine hierarchies, eight of which are operated under consensual guidelines that govern their administration and naming. The current Big Eight are: The alt.* hierarchy is not subject to the procedures controlling groups in the Big Eight, and it is as a result less organized. Groups in the alt.* hierarchy tend to be more specialized or specific—for example, there might be

1386-500: Is normally the sender, rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Usenet was designed under conditions when networks were much slower and not always available. Many sites on the original Usenet network would connect only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out. This is largely because the POTS network was typically used for transfers, and phone charges were lower at night. The format and transmission of Usenet articles

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1452-476: Is one such web based front end and some web browsers can access Google Groups via news: protocol links directly. A minority of newsgroups are moderated, meaning that messages submitted by readers are not distributed directly to Usenet, but instead are emailed to the moderators of the newsgroup for approval. The moderator is to receive submitted articles, review them, and inject approved articles so that they can be properly propagated worldwide. Articles approved by

1518-624: Is posted to. In general the user must manually select, prepare and upload the data. The data is typically encrypted because it is available to anyone to download the backup files. After the files are uploaded, having multiple copies spread to different geographical regions around the world on different news servers decreases the chances of data loss. Major Usenet service providers have a retention time of more than 12 years. This results in more than 60 petabytes (60000 terabytes ) of storage (see image). When using Usenet for data storage, providers that offer longer retention time are preferred to ensure

1584-491: Is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages. The difference between the two is that Usenet articles can be read by any user whose news server carries the group to which the message was posted, as opposed to email messages, which have one or more specific recipients. Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums , blogs , mailing lists and social media . Usenet differs from such media in several ways: Usenet requires no personal registration with

1650-400: Is sufficient storage allocated to handle the amount of articles being added. Without sufficient retention time, a reader will be unable to download all parts of the binary before it is flushed out of the group's storage allocation. This was at one time how posting undesired content was countered; the newsgroup would be flooded with random garbage data posts, of sufficient quantity to push out all

1716-478: Is verification of publication contents and secondary bibliographic sources against the database, with the goals being data accuracy and to improve the coverage of speculative fiction to 100 percent. Several speculative fiction author bibliographies were posted to the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written from 1984 to 1994 by Jerry Boyajian, Gregory J. E. Rawlins and John Wenn. A more or less standard bibliographic format

1782-534: Is visited by over 67,400 people monthly. The database, as of April 2022 , contains 2,002,324 unique story titles from 232,816 authors. USENET Early research and development: Merging the networks and creating the Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: Usenet ( / ˈ j uː z n ɛ t / ), USENET , or, "in full", User's Network ,

1848-502: The alt.binaries hierarchy which largely carries software, music, videos and images, and accounts for over 99 percent of article data. There are also Usenet providers that offer a full unrestricted service to users whose ISPs do not carry news, or that carry a restricted feed. Newsgroups are typically accessed with newsreaders : applications that allow users to read and reply to postings in newsgroups. These applications act as clients to one or more news servers. Historically, Usenet

1914-425: The sci.* hierarchy. Or, talk.origins and talk.atheism are in the talk.* hierarchy. When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read. In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article. The set of articles that can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a thread . Most modern newsreaders display

1980-452: The (typically local) readers able to access that server. The collection of Usenet servers has thus a certain peer-to-peer character in that they share resources by exchanging them, the granularity of exchange however is on a different scale than a modern peer-to-peer system and this characteristic excludes the actual users of the system who connect to the news servers with a typical client-server application, much like an email reader. RFC 850

2046-542: The ISFDB moved to SF Site , a major SF portal and review site. Due to the rising costs of remaining with SF Site, the ISFDB moved to its own domain in December 2002, but it was shut down by the hosting ISP due to high resource usage. In February 2003, it began to be hosted by The Cushing Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection and Institute for Scientific Computation at Texas A&M University . The ISFDB moved to

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2112-975: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database". In April 2009, Zenkat wrote that "it is widely considered one of the most authoritative sources about Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror literature available on the Internet". ISFDB was the winner of the 2005 Wooden Rocket Award in the Best Directory Site category. Ken Irwin reviewed the site for Reference Reviews in 2006, praising "the scalable level of detail available for particular authors and titles" while also pointing out "usability improvements" needed at that time. He concludes by calling it "a tremendous asset to researchers and fans of speculative fiction", stating that no other online bibliographies have "the breadth, depth, and sophistication of this database". On Tor.com , James Davis Nicoll described

2178-554: The Usenet community. One little cited defense of propagation is canceling a propagated message, but few Usenet users use this command and some news readers do not offer cancellation commands , in part because article storage expires in relatively short order anyway. Almost all unmoderated Usenet groups tend to receive large amounts of spam . Usenet is a set of protocols for generating, storing and retrieving news "articles" (which resemble Internet mail messages) and for exchanging them among

2244-626: The accuracy of the database. In late 2022, the ISFDB was publicly criticized for its refusal to update its record of an author's name after a name change. The record remained uncorrected for more than a year, with an ISFDB editor deploying transphobic talking points at one point, in spite of the fact that maintaining a trans author's deadname violates best practices and recommendations from various professional organizations. In 1998, Cory Doctorow wrote in Science Fiction Age that "[T]he best all-round guide to things science-fictional remains

2310-400: The articles arranged into threads and subthreads. For example, in the wine-making newsgroup rec.crafts.winemaking, someone might start a thread called; "What's the best yeast?" and that thread or conversation might grow into dozens of replies long, by perhaps six or eight different authors. Over several days, that conversation about different wine yeasts might branch into several sub-threads in

2376-452: The automatic proliferation of content posted by any user on any server to any other user subscribed to the same newsgroups on other servers. As with BBSes and message boards, individual news servers or service providers are under no obligation to carry any specific content, and may refuse to do so for many reasons: a news server might attempt to control the spread of spam by refusing to accept or forward any posts that trigger spam filters , or

2442-468: The collection. The Vance Integral Edition puts "Mazirian" first in the volume. The sequence is unimportant as the stories are mostly independent of each other. During a far future time, the Sun nears the end its life. The sky ranges from pink to deep blue, lit by a dim red Sun, and strange plants and animals exist. Much of the book is set within the forested country of Ascolais and in the ruined cities covering

2508-447: The content to be suppressed. This has been compensated by service providers allocating enough storage to retain everything posted each day, including spam floods, without deleting anything. Modern Usenet news servers have enough capacity to archive years of binary content even when flooded with new data at the maximum daily speed available. In part because of such long retention times, as well as growing Internet upload speeds, Usenet

2574-559: The data will survive for longer periods of time compared to services with lower retention time. While binary newsgroups can be used to distribute completely legal user-created works, free software , and public domain material, some binary groups are used to illegally distribute proprietary software , copyrighted media, and pornographic material. ISP-operated Usenet servers frequently block access to all alt.binaries.* groups to both reduce network traffic and to avoid related legal issues. Commercial Usenet service providers claim to operate as

2640-494: The entire Usenet network is a nearly impossible task, due to the rapid propagation between servers and the retention done by each server. Petitioning a Usenet provider for removal only removes it from that one server's retention cache, but not any others. It is possible for a special post cancellation message to be distributed to remove it from all servers, but many providers ignore cancel messages by standard policy, because they can be easily falsified and submitted by anyone. For

2706-501: The fact that their planet does not have much longer to live. (It is not specified how much longer the planet has left.) Many of the important people in Ascolais are magicians. They use magic by memorizing lengthy formulas for spells and activating them by speaking the proper commands. Once cast, the spell formula is forgotten, requiring the wizard to reread and re-memorize them. Because even talented magicians can only memorize and must "load"

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2772-399: The files reaches a server. Binary newsgroups can be used to distribute files, and, as of 2022, some remain popular as an alternative to BitTorrent to share and download files. Each news server allocates a certain amount of storage space for content in each newsgroup. When this storage has been filled, each time a new post arrives, old posts are deleted to make room for the new content. If

2838-738: The group concerned; information need not be stored on a remote server; archives are always available; and reading the messages does not require a mail or web client, but a news client. However, it is now possible to read and participate in Usenet newsgroups to a large degree using ordinary web browsers since most newsgroups are now copied to several web sites. The groups in alt.binaries are still widely used for data transfer. Many Internet service providers, and many other Internet sites, operate news servers for their users to access. ISPs that do not operate their own servers directly will often offer their users an account from another provider that specifically operates newsfeeds. In early news implementations,

2904-476: The group name. Usenet newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchy are created by proposals called a Request for Discussion, or RFD. The RFD is required to have the following information: newsgroup name, checkgroups file entry, and moderated or unmoderated status. If the group is to be moderated, then at least one moderator with a valid email address must be provided. Other information which is beneficial but not required includes:

2970-670: The historical gnu.* hierarchy from the Free Software Foundation . Microsoft closed its newsserver in June 2010, providing support for its products over forums now. Some users prefer to use the term "Usenet" to refer only to the Big Eight hierarchies; others include alt.* as well. The more general term "netnews" incorporates the entire medium, including private organizational news systems. Informal sub-hierarchy conventions also exist. *.answers are typically moderated cross-post groups for FAQs. An FAQ would be posted within one group and

3036-616: The identity of the person posting illegal content is equally difficult due to the trust-based design of the network. Like SMTP email, servers generally assume the header and origin information in a post is true and accurate. However, as in SMTP email, Usenet post headers are easily falsified so as to obscure the true identity and location of the message source. In this manner, Usenet is significantly different from modern P2P services; most P2P users distributing content are typically immediately identifiable to all other users by their network address , but

3102-420: The landscape. The setting is marked by the presence of ancient ruins and other fragments of decayed civilizations. The human population is shrinking. Most live in structures built long ago, in varying degrees of ruin, squalor, or luxury. Many also make use of magic (or in some cases, technology) which was created long ago but which they no longer understand. Characters often make carefree, nihilistic references to

3168-721: The manual deletion of infringing material using the provisions of World Intellectual Property Organization treaty implementations, such as the United States Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act , but this would require giving notice to each individual news server administrator. On the Internet, Usenet is transported via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on TCP Port 119 for standard, unprotected connections and on TCP port 563 for SSL encrypted connections. The major set of worldwide newsgroups

3234-419: The network bandwidth available to a server is high but the storage allocation is small, it is possible for a huge flood of incoming content to overflow the allocation and push out everything that was in the group before it. The average length of time that posts are able to stay on the server before being deleted is commonly called the retention time . Binary newsgroups are only able to function reliably if there

3300-472: The networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as " FAQ ", " flame ", " sockpuppet ", and " spam ". In the early 1990s, shortly before access to the Internet became commonly affordable, Usenet connections via FidoNet 's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions and other communication widespread, not needing a server, just (local) telephone service. The name Usenet comes from

3366-456: The newly developed news software such as A News . The name "Usenet" emphasizes its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation. The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories known as newsgroups , which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, sci.math and sci.physics are within

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3432-429: The novel series. Internet Speculative Fiction Database The Internet Speculative Fiction Database ( ISFDB ) is a database of bibliographic information on genres considered speculative fiction , including science fiction and related genres such as fantasy , alternate history , and horror fiction . The ISFDB is a volunteer effort, with the database being open for moderated editing and user contributions, and

3498-412: The origin information for a Usenet posting can be completely obscured and unobtainable once it has propagated past the original server. Also unlike modern P2P services, the identity of the downloaders is hidden from view. On P2P services a downloader is identifiable to all others by their network address. On Usenet, the downloader connects directly to a server, and only the server knows the address of who

3564-484: The rise of the World Wide Web (WWW), web front-ends (web2news) have become more common. Web front ends have lowered the technical entry barrier requirements to that of one application and no Usenet NNTP server account. There are numerous websites now offering web based gateways to Usenet groups, although some people have begun filtering messages made by some of the web interfaces for one reason or another. Google Groups

3630-435: The server and newsreader were a single program suite, running on the same system. Today, one uses separate newsreader client software, a program that resembles an email client but accesses Usenet servers instead. Not all ISPs run news servers. A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer because of the large amount of data involved, small customer base (compared to mainstream Internet service), and

3696-404: The site as "the single best [SFF] bibliographical resource there is". Gabriel McKee, author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction , described the site as an "indispensable [source] of information in putting this project together", and the site was described as "invaluable" by Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgmann in their book, Science Fiction and Climate Change . The Chicon 8 committee gave

3762-658: The site. In 1995, Al von Ruff and "Ahasuerus" (a prolific contributor to rec.arts.sf.written) started to construct the ISFDB, based on experience with the SFCH and the bibliographic format finalized by John Wenn. The first version of ISFDB went live on 8 September 1995, and a URL was published in January 1996. The ISFDB was first located at an ISP in Champaign Illinois, but it suffered from constrained resources in disk space and database support, which limited its growth. In October 1997

3828-492: The term "users' network". The first Usenet group was NET.general , which quickly became net.general . The first commercial spam on Usenet was from immigration attorneys Canter and Siegel advertising green card services. On the Internet, Usenet is transported via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port 119 for standard, unprotected connections, and on TCP port 563 for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypted connections. Usenet

3894-507: The traffic. The oldest widely used encoding method for binary content is uuencode , from the Unix UUCP package. In the late 1980s, Usenet articles were often limited to 60,000 characters, and larger hard limits exist today. Files are therefore commonly split into sections that require reassembly by the reader. With the header extensions and the Base64 and Quoted-Printable MIME encodings, there

3960-515: Was a new generation of binary transport. In practice, MIME has seen increased adoption in text messages, but it is avoided for most binary attachments. Some operating systems with metadata attached to files use specialized encoding formats. For Mac OS, both BinHex and special MIME types are used. Other lesser known encoding systems that may have been used at one time were BTOA , XX encoding , BOO , and USR encoding. In an attempt to reduce file transfer times, an informal file encoding known as yEnc

4026-462: Was associated with the Unix operating system developed at AT&T , but newsreaders were soon available for all major operating systems. Email client programs and Internet suites of the late 1990s and 2000s often included an integrated newsreader. Newsgroup enthusiasts often criticized these as inferior to standalone newsreaders that made correct use of Usenet protocols, standards and conventions. With

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4092-625: Was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University , over a decade before the World Wide Web went online (and thus before the general public received access to the Internet ), making it one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was originally built on the "poor man's ARPANET ", employing UUCP as its transport protocol to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through

4158-559: Was developed for these postings. Many of these bibliographies can still be found at The Linköping Science Fiction Archive. In 1993, a searchable database of awards information was developed by Al von Ruff. In 1994, John R. R. Leavitt created the Speculative Fiction Clearing House (SFCH). In late 1994, he asked for help in displaying awards information, and von Ruff offered his database tools. Leavitt declined, because he wanted code that could interact with other aspects of

4224-475: Was featured in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide under Appendix N : Literature as one of the works that were read during the development of the game system. The designer, Gary Gygax , also credited the novel with being the inspiration for the magic system, which he called "Vancian". The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game , Pelgrane Press (2001). A tabletop roleplaying game based on

4290-429: Was introduced in 2001. It achieves about a 30% reduction in data transferred by assuming that most 8-bit characters can safely be transferred across the network without first encoding into the 7-bit ASCII space. The most common method of uploading large binary posts to Usenet is to convert the files into RAR archives and create Parchive files for them. Parity files are used to recreate missing data when not every part of

4356-450: Was the first formal specification of the messages exchanged by Usenet servers. It was superseded by RFC 1036 and subsequently by RFC 5536 and RFC 5537. In cases where unsuitable content has been posted, Usenet has support for automated removal of a posting from the whole network by creating a cancel message, although due to a lack of authentication and resultant abuse, this capability is frequently disabled. Copyright holders may still request

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