Urbit is a decentralized personal server platform based on functional programming in a peer-to-peer network . The Urbit platform was created by neoreactionary political blogger Curtis Yarvin . The first code release was in 2010. The Urbit network was launched in 2013. The first user version (called OS1) was launched in April 2020.
102-780: In 2022, the main software in an Urbit installation was a "bare-bones" text-based message board. The Point described Urbit OS1 as a "bare-bones messaging server" and compared it to 1990s era Usenet . Tlon, the company founded by Yarvin to build Urbit, named after the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges , has received seed funding from various investors since its inception, most notably Peter Thiel , whose Founders Fund , with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $ 1.1 million. The Urbit community talks up its association with and funding from Thiel, who has also backed Urbit public events. The Point estimated Urbit's active user base as of September 2022 at "a few thousand." The Urbit software stack consists of
204-406: A guest or visitor . Guests are typically granted access to all functions that do not require database alterations or breach privacy. A guest can usually view the contents of the forum or use such features as read marking , but occasionally an administrator will disallow visitors to read their forum as an incentive to become a registered member. A person who is a very frequent visitor of the forum,
306-461: A sig ), which is a block of text, possibly with BBCode, that appears at the bottom of all of the user's posts. There is a character limit on signatures, though it may be so high that it is rarely hit. Often, the forum's moderators impose manual rules on signatures to prevent them from being obnoxious (for example, being extremely long or having flashing images) and issue warnings or bans to users who break these rules. Like avatars, signatures may improve
408-408: A "cabal" of "petty tyrants". On 4chan , moderators are subject to notable levels of mockery and contempt. There, they are often referred to as janitors (or, more pejoratively, "jannies" ) given their job, which is tantamount to cleaning up the imageboards' infamous shitposting . The administrators (short form: "admin") manage the technical details required for running the site. As such, they have
510-424: A Non-Threaded format is best. If a user has a message topic and multiple replies to that message topic, a semi-threaded format is best. If a user has a message topic and replies to that message topic and responds to replies, then a fully threaded format is best. Internally, Western-style forums organize visitors and logged-in members into user groups. Privileges and rights are given based on these groups. A user of
612-520: A certain number) when selecting options, as well as private or public display of voters. Polls can be set to expire after a certain date or, in some cases, after a number of days from their creation. Members vote in a poll, and a statistic is displayed graphically. An ignore list allows members to hide posts of other members that they do not want to see or have a problem with. In most implementations, they are referred to as foe list or ignore list . The posts are usually not hidden but minimized, with only
714-400: A certain user has made. Users with higher postcounts are often considered more reputable than users with lower postcounts, but not always. For instance, some forums have disabled postcounts with the hopes that doing so will emphasize the quality of information over quantity. A thread (sometimes called a topic ) is a collection of posts, usually displayed from oldest to latest, although this
816-588: 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
918-603: 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
1020-485: A different icon compared to other threads. This icon may stand out more to emphasize the thread. If the forum's users have lost interest in a particular thread, it becomes a dead thread . Forums prefer the premise of open and free discussion and often adopt de facto standards . The most common topics on forums include questions, comparisons, polls of opinion, and debates. It is not uncommon for nonsense or unsocial behavior to sprout as people lose their temper, especially if
1122-454: 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
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#17328765993001224-422: A forum for threaded, or asynchronous, discussion purposes. The group may or may not be the only users of the forum. A thread's popularity is measured on forums in reply (total posts minus one, the opening post, in most default forum settings) counts. Some forums also track page views . Threads meeting a set number of posts or a set number of views may receive a designation such as "hot thread" and be displayed with
1326-536: A huge number of topics. Internet slang and image macros popular across the Internet are abundant and widely used in Internet forums. Forum software packages are widely available on the Internet and are written in a variety of programming languages , such as PHP , Perl , Java , and ASP . The configuration and records of posts can be stored in text files or in a database . Each package offers different features, from
1428-474: A member posts in a thread for no reason but to have it go to the top, it is referred to as a bump or bumping . It has been suggested that "bump" is an acronym of "bring up my post"; however, this is almost certainly a backronym , and the usage is entirely consistent with the verb "bump" which means "to knock to a new position". On some messageboards, users can choose to sage (correctly pronounced /sa-ɣe/ though often confused as IPA: [seɪdʒ] )
1530-573: 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
1632-499: A news server might attempt to control the spread of spam by refusing to accept or forward any posts that trigger spam filters , or 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
1734-682: 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
1836-503: A political structure". Josh Lehman, Executive Director of the Urbit Foundation, denied in 2022 that Urbit was "digital feudalism." Andrea O'Sullivan of libertarian magazine Reason described Urbit in 2016 as having a "libertarian vision". Yarvin departed Tlon in 2019. Lehman said that the "hardest part" of his work at Tlon had been to distance Urbit from Yarvin. Usenet Early research and development: Merging
1938-410: A post if they wish to make a post but not "bump" it. The word "sage" derives from the 2channel terminology 下げる sageru , meaning "to lower". Threads that are important but rarely receive posts are stickied (or, in some software, "pinned"). A sticky thread will always appear in front of normal threads, often in its own section. A "threaded discussion group" is simply any group of individuals who use
2040-714: A post. An emoticon , or smiley , is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form. Forums implement a system through which some of the text representations of emoticons (e.g., xD , :p ) are rendered as a small image. Depending on what part of the world the forum's topic originates from (since most forums are international), smilies can be replaced by other forms of similar graphics; an example would be kaoani (e.g., *(^O^)* , (^-^)b ), or even text between special symbols (e.g., :blink:, :idea:). Most forums implement an opinion poll system for threads. Most implementations allow for single-choice or multi-choice (sometimes limited to
2142-412: 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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#17328765993002244-416: A section, or even a thread is referred to as a lurker , and the habit is referred to as lurking . Registered members often will refer to themselves as lurking in a particular location, which is to say they have no intention of participating in that section but enjoy reading the contributions to it. The moderators (short singular form: "mod") are users (or employees) of the forum who are granted access to
2346-638: A server, just (local) telephone service. The name Usenet comes from 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
2448-465: A set of programming languages ("Hoon," a high-level functional programming language, and "Nock," its low-level compiled language); a single-function operating system built on those languages ("Arvo"); a runtime implementation of that operating system ("Vere"), public key infrastructure, built on the Ethereum blockchain ("Azimuth"), for each Urbit instance to participate in a decentralized network; and
2550-440: A single-threaded discussion of any given blog post. Slashcode , on the other hand, is far more complicated, allowing fully threaded discussions and incorporating a robust moderation and meta-moderation system as well as many of the profile features available to forum users. Some stand-alone threads on forums have reached fame and notability, such as the " I am lonely will anyone speak to me " thread on MovieCodec.com's forums, which
2652-411: A small bar indicating a post from the user on the ignore list is there. Almost all Internet forums include a member list , which allows the display of all forum members with an integrated search feature. Some forums will not list members with zero posts, even if they have activated their accounts. Many forums allow users to give themselves an avatar . An avatar is an image that appears beside all of
2754-459: A specific set of jargon associated with them; for example, a single conversation is called a " thread ", or topic . The name comes from the forums of Ancient Rome. A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure; a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread and can be replied to by as many people as they so wish. Depending on
2856-457: 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
2958-513: 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
3060-595: A thread, eventually ending when everyone gives up or attention spans waver and a more interesting subject takes over. It is not uncommon for debate to end in ad hominem attacks. Several lawsuits have been brought against the forums and moderators, claiming libel and damage. A recent case is the Scubaboard lawsuit, where a business in the Maldives filed a suit against Scubaboard for libel and defamation in January 2010. For
3162-418: 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
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3264-417: A user's posts in order to make the user more recognizable. The user may upload the image to the forum database or provide a link to an image on a separate website. Each forum has limits on the height, width, and data size of avatars that may be used; if the user tries to use an avatar that is too big, it may be scaled down or rejected. Similarly, most forums allow users to define a signature (sometimes called
3366-533: A web version of an electronic mailing list or newsgroup (such as those that exist on Usenet ), allowing people to post messages and comment on other messages. Later developments emulated the different newsgroups or individual lists, providing more than one forum dedicated to a particular topic. Internet forums are prevalent in several developed countries . Japan posts the most, with over two million per day on their largest forum, 2channel . China also has millions of posts on forums such as Tianya Club . Some of
3468-459: Is [i]clever[/i] [b] [i]text[/i] [/b] . When the post is viewed, the code is rendered to HTML and will appear as: This is clever text . Many forum packages offer a way to create Custom BBCodes, or BBcodes that are not built into the package, where the administrator of the board can create complex BBCodes to allow the use of JavaScript or iframe functions in posts, for example, embedding a YouTube or Google Video complete with viewer directly into
3570-518: Is a user-submitted message enclosed in a block containing the user's details and the date and time it was submitted. Members are usually allowed to edit or delete their own posts. Posts are contained in threads, where they appear as blocks one after another. The first post starts the thread; this may be called the TS (thread starter) or OP (original post). Posts that follow in the thread are meant to continue discussion about that post or respond to other replies; it
3672-405: 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
3774-402: Is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible. Forums have
3876-521: Is connecting to it. Some Usenet providers do keep usage logs, but not all make this logged information casually available to outside parties such as the Recording Industry Association of America . The existence of anonymising gateways to USENET also complicates the tracing of a postings true origin. Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer , David Wiseman. Copied with permission from Internet forum An Internet forum , or message board ,
3978-403: 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
4080-500: 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
4182-471: Is not uncommon for discussions to be derailed. On Western forums, the classic way to show a member's own details (such as name and avatar) has been on the left side of the post, in a narrow column of fixed width, with the post controls located on the right, at the bottom of the main body, above the signature block. In more recent forum software implementations, the Asian style of displaying the members' details above
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4284-476: 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
4386-624: 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
4488-491: 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
4590-400: 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
4692-674: Is the hashed result of a password that allows one's identity to be recognized without storing any data about the user. In a tripcode system, a secret password is added to the user's name following a separator character (often a number sign ). This password, or tripcode, is hashed into a special key, or trip, distinguishable from the name by HTML styles. Tripcodes cannot be faked, but on some types of forum software, they are insecure and can be guessed. On other types, they can be brute-forced with software designed to search for tripcodes, such as Tripcode Explorer. Moderators and administrators will frequently assign themselves capcodes or tripcodes where
4794-412: Is the size of the files in question). Attachments can be part of a thread, a social group, etc. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is sometimes allowed, but usually its use is discouraged or, when allowed, extensively filtered. Modern bulletin board systems often have it disabled altogether or allow only administrators to use it, as allowing it at any normal user level is considered a security risk due to
4896-460: Is typically configurable: Options for newest to oldest and for a threaded view (a tree-like view applying logical reply structure before chronological order) can be available. A thread is defined by a title, an additional description that may summarize the intended discussion, and an opening or original post (common abbreviation OP , which can also be used to refer to the original poster ), which opens whatever dialogue or makes whatever announcement
4998-502: 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
5100-516: The posts and threads of all members for the purpose of moderating discussion (similar to arbitration ) and also keeping the forum clean (neutralizing spam and spambots , etc.). Moderators also answer users' concerns about the forum and general questions, as well as respond to specific complaints. Common privileges of moderators include: deleting, merging, moving, and splitting of posts and threads, locking, renaming, and stickying of threads; banning , unbanning, suspending, unsuspending, warning
5202-425: 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
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#17328765993005304-452: 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
5406-533: The BCC or even if one was sent in the first place. Private messages are generally used for personal conversations. They can also be used with tripcodes—a message is addressed to a public trip and can be picked up by typing in the tripcode. An attachment can be almost any file. When someone attaches a file to a person's post, they are uploading that particular file to the forum's server. Forums usually have very strict limits on what can be attached and what cannot (among which
5508-554: 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
5610-400: 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
5712-424: The authority to appoint and revoke members as moderators , manage the rules, create sections and sub-sections, as well as perform any database operations ( database backup , etc.). Administrators often also act as moderators . Administrators may also make forum-wide announcements or change the appearance (known as the skin) of a forum. There are also many forums where administrators share their knowledge. A post
5814-447: 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
5916-559: 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
6018-456: The decentralized network itself, an encrypted, peer-to-peer protocol . The 128-bit Urbit identity space consists of 256 "galaxies", 65,280 "stars" (255 for each galaxy), and 4,294,901,760 "planets" (65,535 for each star) and comets under those. Yarvin called Urbit "functional programming from scratch" in 2010. The Register described Urbit as having "reinvented some very Lisp -like technology." Reason described Urbit as "complicated for even
6120-494: 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
6222-474: The feeds they want. Usenet is culturally and historically significant in 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
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#17328765993006324-399: 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
6426-618: The first forum systems were the Planet-Forum system, developed at the beginning of the 1970s; the EIES system , first operational in 1976; and the KOM system , first operational in 1977. One of the first forum sites (which is still active today) is Delphi Forums, once called Delphi . The service, with four million members, dates to 1983. Forums perform a function similar to that of dial-up bulletin board systems and Usenet networks that were first created in
6528-399: The forum can automatically be promoted to a more privileged user group based on criteria set by the administrator. A person viewing a closed thread as a member will see a box saying he does not have the right to submit messages there, but a moderator will likely see the same box, granting him access to more than just posting messages. An unregistered user of the site is commonly known as
6630-545: The forum's settings, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in to post messages. On most forums, users do not have to log in to read existing messages. The modern forum originated from bulletin boards and so-called computer conferencing systems, which are a technological evolution of the dial-up bulletin board system (BBS). From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications that manage user-generated content . Early Internet forums could be described as
6732-738: 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,
6834-476: 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:
6936-403: The guessable trip is replaced with a special notice (such as "# Administrator") or cap. A personal or private message , or PM for short, is a message sent in private from a member to one or more other members. The ability to send so-called blind carbon copies (BCC) is sometimes available. When sending a BCC, the users to whom the message is sent directly will not be aware of the recipients of
7038-611: The high rate of XSS vulnerabilities. When HTML is disabled, Bulletin Board Code (BBCode) is the most common preferred alternative. BBCode usually consists of a tag, similar to HTML, but instead of < and > , the tagname is enclosed within square brackets (meaning: [ and ] ). Commonly, [i] is used for italic type , [b] is used for bold , [u] for underline , [color="value"] for color, and [list] for lists, as well as [img] for images and [url] for links. The following example BBCode: [b]This[/b]
7140-670: 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
7242-425: 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 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
7344-616: 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
7446-505: The late 1970s. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1994, with the WIT project from the W3 Consortium, and starting at this time, many alternatives were created. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology , video games , sports , music , fashion , religion , and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for
7548-435: The local one, while the local server will receive any news its peers have that it currently lacks. This results in 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:
7650-649: 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
7752-477: The members; or adding, editing, and removing the polls of threads. "Junior modding", "backseat modding", or "forum copping" can refer negatively to the behavior of ordinary users who take a moderator-like tone in criticizing other members. Essentially, it is the duty of the moderator to manage the day-to-day affairs of a forum or board as it applies to the stream of user contributions and interactions. The relative effectiveness of this user management directly impacts
7854-415: The most basic, providing text-only postings, to more advanced packages, offering multimedia support and formatting code (usually known as BBCode ). Many packages can be integrated easily into an existing website to allow visitors to post comments on articles. Several other web applications, such as blog software, also incorporate forum features. WordPress comments at the bottom of a blog post allow for
7956-536: The most part, though, forum owners and moderators in the United States are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act , which states that "[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider". In 2019, Facebook was faced with a class action lawsuit set forth by moderators diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder . It
8058-509: The most seasoned of functional programmers". In 2015, Yarvin's invitation to discuss Urbit at the Strange Loop programming conference was rescinded; the conference organizer said Yarvin's "mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk." In 2016, after Yarvin was invited to the functional programming conference LambdaConf to discuss Urbit, five speakers and three sponsors withdrew their participation. Their stated reason
8160-419: 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
8262-534: 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 , 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
8364-456: 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
8466-412: 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
8568-562: The places under which members can start their discussions or posts . Logically, forums are organized into a finite set of generic topics (usually with one main topic), driven and updated by a group known as members , and governed by a group known as moderators . It can also have a graph structure. All message boards will use one of three possible display formats. Each of the three basic message board display formats: Non-Threaded/Semi-Threaded/Fully Threaded, has its own advantages and disadvantages. If messages are not related to one another at all,
8670-402: The post has been copied. Posts have an internal limit, usually measured in characters. Often, one is required to have a message with a minimum length of 10 characters. There is always an upper limit, but it is rarely reached – most boards have it at either 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, or 50,000 characters. Most forums keep track of a user's postcount. The postcount is a measurement of how many posts
8772-502: The poster wishes. A thread can contain any number of posts, including multiple posts from the same members, even if they are one after the other. A thread is contained in a forum and may have an associated date that is taken as the date of the last post (options to order threads by other criteria are generally available). When a member posts in a thread, it will jump to the top since it is the latest updated thread. Similarly, other threads will jump in front of it when they receive posts. When
8874-429: The quality of a forum in general, its appeal, and its usefulness as a community of interrelated users. Moderators act as unpaid volunteers on many websites, which has sparked controversies and community tensions. On Reddit , some moderators have prominently expressed dissatisfaction with their unpaid labor being underappreciated, while other site users have accused moderators of abusing special access privileges to act as
8976-403: The recognizability of a poster. They may also allow the user to attach information to all of their posts, such as proclaiming support for a cause, noting facts about themselves, or quoting humorous things that have previously been said on the forum. A subscription is a form of automated notification integrated into the software of most forums. It usually notifies the member either by email or on
9078-484: 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
9180-435: 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
9282-544: 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 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
9384-500: The site when the member returns. The option to subscribe is available for every thread while logged in. Subscriptions work with read marking , namely the property of unread , which is given to the content never served to the user by the software. Recent developments in some popular implementations of forum software have brought social network features and functionality . Such features include personal galleries and pages, as well as social networks like chat systems. Most forum software
9486-417: The topic is controversial. Poor understanding of the differences in values among the participants is a common problem on forums. Because replies to a topic are often worded to target someone's point of view, discussion will usually go slightly off in several directions as people question each other's validity, sources, and so on. Circular discussion and ambiguity in replies can extend for several tens of posts in
9588-507: 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
9690-404: Was Yarvin's claims that white people have higher IQs than black people and his alleged support of slavery. The source code and design sketches for the project alluded to some of Yarvin's views, including initially classifying users as "lords," "dukes," and "earls." Yarvin described this structure of Urbit in 2010 as "digital feudalism ." In a 2019 blog post, Yarvin said Urbit "is not designed as
9792-515: 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
9894-462: 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
9996-625: 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
10098-423: Was described as the "web's top hangout for lonely folk" by Wired magazine . A forum consists of a tree-like directory structure. The top end is "Categories". A forum can be divided into categories for the relevant discussions. Under the categories are sub-forums, and these sub-forums can further have more sub-forums. The topics (commonly called threads ) come under the lowest level of sub-forums, and these are
10200-429: 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
10302-410: Was settled for $ 52 million the following year. By default, to be an Internet forum, the web application needs the ability to submit threads and replies. Typically, threads are in a newer to older view, and replies are in an older to newer view. Most imageboards and 2channel-style discussion boards allow (and encourage) anonymous posting and use a system of tripcodes instead of registration. A tripcode
10404-450: 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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