What is Usenet Completion?

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 Usenet 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 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.