Troll

A Usenet participant that deliberately attempts to cause conflict and general discontent in a newsgroup. Trolls are generally not interested in any form of discourse and participate only to get a rise out of other users. In most cases, a troll is best dealt with by ignoring them or placing them in a killfile. Because of the negative view that trolls tend to have amongst the Usenet community, the Usenet troll is aligned with the mythical troll of fairy tales, usually depicted as ugly and unwelcome. Trolls and flamers have become such common phenomena in the world of Usenet and the internet at large that they have attracted the attention of social scientists; thus, academic research on the psychological and social motivations for the behavior of trolls is widely available.

Usenet Client / News reader / News Client

The software used to participate in Usenet newsgroups. Such programs make Usenet accessible and browsable through an interface that is much like a traditional web browser, allowing users to search newsgroups, download binaries, and read text articles. There are many news clients available, including those associated with the various web browsers such as Mozilla's Thunderbird which lets you read email and Usenet. There are also free and paid commercial clients with a variety of different features available.

yEnc

yEnc is an 8-bit extended ASCII encoding method used to convert binary files for use on Usenet. yEnc was developed as an alternative to uuencode, BASE64, and BinHex. yEnc works by converting bytes in a binary file to a special set of 8-bit extended ASCII characters (encoding). These characters are then posted into a newsgroup article and downloaded by other readers. The characters are then converted back to the original binary bytes (decoding) so the reader can view or use the original file. Example of yEnc Encoded characters: ????V??Qh????@ K???b??_=@? =}A+5?c ? ?+?U?]????Tp?F ?????V??? yEnc was an improvement over tradtional encoding technologies such as uuencode or BASE64 because it utilizes the current 8-bit method of data storage vs. the 6-bit or 7-bit based encoding used in previous generations of encoding algoritms. yEnc's 8-bit based encoding algorithm means a smoother conversion from the original binary file and less character mapping. Tradtional Usenet based encoding algorithms add 33-40% of additional data to your source file. This additional data is referred to as overhead. Overhead includes header data and additional character mapping for Usenet specific bytes (examples: nulls, \n\b.\r). yEnc only adds 1-2% overhead through it's encoding algorithm. The value in reduced overhead is felt all along the Usenet chain. By utilizing yEnc the poster spends less time encoding and transferring their encoded file to Usenet. The Usenet provider spends less bandwidth and storage hosting the article and making it available for download to other Usenet users. Downloaders also spend less time downloading the articles and decoding them back into the original file format. Most news readers today support integrated yEnc support so chances are you probably would never know that a post was made using the yEnc encoding algorithm.