What is Usenet Retention ?

This explains how retention times get set for different usenet newsgroups. On each news server the administrator will determine the retention for each usenet newsgroup usually by allotting it a certain amount of hard drive space. So alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classical (a relatively busy newsgroup receiving 100's of songs a day) will have a longer retention than alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd (an extremely busy newsgroup receiving 1000's of songs a day). An easy way to tell what the retention is for a newsgroup is to look through the list and see when the oldest messages are from. If all the messages are from the last three days, then the retention is about 3 days!

A term that you should get to know, when it comes to usenet news servers, is, completion rate. The completion rate is a percentage based on how many messages there are for a file and how many the server actually received. In plain English, it is the percentage of how many files actually are complete and available for download. A file may have 100 or more text messages that make contain all the data for the file, if any of these messages are missing then the file must wait to either get the missing data from a repost or through the use or par/par2 files. The higher the completion rate (e.g.. 95%) the more messages are getting through and the fewer files are not available due to missing parts. This is crucial, any seasoned usenet newsgroup user knows the enormous difference between a listing that is destroyed by missing parts and a wonderful server that has almost perfect completion and the experience is so much better.