Okay, so you want to know what "yEnc" is?
First let's talk about encoding mechanisms. Newsgroups were designed for
text. When I say text, I mean a series of alphanumeric characters, like your
reading right now -- the letters A-Z, the numbers, punctuation, whitespace, etc.
Newsgroups were never intended to be used to transfer binary file such as music,
movies, archives, etc. You can't simply send a "picture" in a newsgroup as-is,
as the newsgroup cannot handle the binary format of the picture.
So, what we need is to have some way to convert the binary data
(from the "file" we're uploading) into text that the newsgroup can
support. In the beginning, there were several ways to do this, called uuencode,
xxencode, and mime. These things are called encoders, because they "encode" the
binary data from the file into text which can be posted to the newsgroup.
UUencode was the most popular of the encoders, but it was not as efficient as
it could be. This led some enterprising individual to create yEnc, which
purports to be a more efficient alternative to uuencode. By more efficient, we
mean that yEnc encodes binary data using fewer text characters than uuencode.
This means that yEnc produces smaller newsgroup posts than uuencode, resulting
in faster upload and download times.
The best part of yEnc is that newsgroup downloaders that support it (such as
Android,
SBNews, etc) do so
automatically. Normally, you don't need to worry about it, and you won't
even be aware that yEnc was used to encode the post. Some legacy newsreaders
don't support yEnc. IF you have such an old newsreader, then get rid of it and
upgrade to one of the downloaders listed below.
It's a fact that some people hate yEnc, you'll see posts to that effect in
the newsgroups. I'm not quite sure why this is so, but is probably likely that
they are using software that doesn't support yEnc, and hence are getting annoyed
by the posts that they cannot decode. For this reason, when posting you may wish
to confine yourself to posting using the more widely supported uuencode (Android's
multi-part-poster will do this). Or you can go ahead and post using yEnc, and
just tell any objectors to stuff it if they get ticked off at you.
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