# 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 an own article 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 can not be held for eternity because of harddisk limits. Because of this there is usually a program called expire on the 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 of 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 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 of 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 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 check out if the document has been changed since the signing or if it's the original text from the author.

Posting

An article which is sent to usenet or the sending itself. You are posting an article into a newsgroup.

## Q

Quoting

This is the citing of an article you're answering to. You are quoting the original article to make clear on which passages your text 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

The signature is a personal sign of the author which is attached at the normal contents of the article. It's a kind of visiting card, very often there are e-mail addresses, a homepage URL or other personal data. The signature shouldn't be longer than 4 lines. The signature shouldn't 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.