[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrew Coppin]

Anthony Chaumas-Pellet wrote:
> From: Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>
>
>   
>> Really? Most web servers will accept a connection from anybody. (Unless 
>> it's *intended* to be an Intranet.) I'm not quite sure why somebody 
>> would configure their NNTP server differently...
>>     
>
> The scale of an NNTP server is simply a *lot* bigger than most web
> servers, where you only need as much storage capacity and bandwidth as
> you have content to offer.
>
> Daily traffic on the whole of the Usenet takes up a few terabytes, and
> you presumably want to store more than one day worth of Usenet
> traffic. You also need to keep in sync with the other Usenet servers,
> as you are not the sole provider of content.
>
> So, NNTP servers need to be powerhouses if they hope to serve even
> part of the Usenet, and they're closer to search engines than to HTTP
> servers in terms of the resources required.
>
> (For what it's worth, my ISP uses a high-end, dedicated NNTP provider
> for their Usenet service. For a regular user, it actually costs more
> to subscribe to that NTTP server alone than to my ISP. Unsurprisingly,
> my ISP only authorizes its own users to access that particular
> service.)
>   

What is this "Usenet" thing people keen mentioning?

When I want to visit the POV-Ray website, I point my HTTP client at 
www.povray.org and it displays the page. When I want to use the POV-Ray 
NNTP forums, I point my NNTP client at news.povray.org and it displays 
the forums. It works the same way. I don't see how this involves "a few 
terabytes"...