# Glossary

## A

Article

  An article in the sense of newspapers: special articles are, for example, followups; replies are not articles but Email.

## C

Canceling

  To delete one of your articles from the newsserver: the newsreader generates a special control message to tell the server to delete this article.

Crossposting

  The posting of an article in several newsgroups; this is very often disliked, because it disturbs the topic-oriented association of the newsgroups.

## E

Expire

  Articles cannot be held for eternity because of harddisk limits. Because of this there is usually a program called expire on most computer systems; this program deletes all articles which are older than a configured number of days. &knode; includes this functionality on its own.

## F

FAQ

  FAQ is the acronym for Frequently Asked Questions.

Followup

  An article which is written as an answer to another article.

## G

GNKSA

  GNKSA is a kind of seal-of-approval for newsreaders; you can get more information at http://www.gnksa.org.

## H

Header

  The Header of an article contains information about the sender, the subject, and the newsgroup of the article.

## K

Killfile

  This is a functionality of a newsreader to hide articles of a determined sender or with certain contents.

## M

Message-ID

  The Message-ID of an article is a clear mark for the newsserver to identify the article. A Message-ID should not be used twice in the whole usenet for about 2 years; wrong or double Message-IDs could cause problems when forwarding them and could overwrite other articles.

## N

Newbie

  Somebody who is new somewhere, in relationship to usenet: somebody who is new to the newsgroup, or new to usenet in general.

Newsgroup

  A kind-of bulletin board in the usenet about a special topic or a group of topics. This is where you post your articles.

Newsreader

  A program for reading and writing news.

NNTP

  Network News Transport Protocol; this is the protocol which defines how the articles in the usenet are spread.

## P

Port

  A kind-of address for the application to listen for data on and for connecting to another computer; the standard-port for the connection between the newsreader and the newsserver is 119.

PGP-Signature

  A digital signature; you can use it to determine whether the document has been changed since it was signed or if it is the original text from the author.

Posting

  Either an article which is sent to usenet or the act of sending itself; you are posting an article into a newsgroup.

## Q

Quoting

  This is the act of citing of an article to which you are answering: you quote the original article to make clear which passages of text your answer refers to.

## R

Reply

  A reply is an answer to the author of an article by e-mail.

## S

Scoring

  This is the valuation of an article or a thread.

Signature

  A signature is a personal sign of the author which is attached at the end of the normal contents of the article; it is like a visiting card — very often there are e-mail addresses, a homepage URL or other personal data. The signature should not be longer than 4 lines. Note that the signature should not be mixed up with the PGP-signature.

Supersede

  This is the overwriting of an existing article: the newsreader generates a special article with a control message in the header which tells the newsserver to overwrite the existing article with this one.