How Newsgroups Work
Newsgroup servers are hosted by various organizations and institutions. Most Internet service providers host their own news servers, or rent access to one, for their subscribers. There are also a number of companies who sell access to premium news servers.
Every host of a news server maintains agreements with other news servers to regularly synchronize. In this way news servers form a network. When a user posts to one news server, the message is stored locally. That server then shares the message with the servers that are connected to it if both carry the newsgroup, and from those servers to servers that they are connected to, and so on. For newsgroups that are not widely carried, sometimes a carrier group is used for crossposting to aid distribution. This is typically only useful for groups that have been removed or newer alt.* groups. Crossposts between hierarchies, outside of the Big 8 and alt.* hierarchies, are failure prone.
Read more about this topic: Usenet Newsgroup
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