What are Newsgroups?
Newsgroups are entities that contain the articles that people post in Usenet. Articles are grouped in newsgroups by topic for easy retrieval and differentiation purposes. Imagine that the millions of different articles Usenet contains today were all thrown in one bucket. How would be able to find anything in that bucket? It would be impossible. Therefore, the whole Usenet content is divided into hundreds of thousands of different newsgroups which all have their own topics and purpose. This division makes it much easier for the users to find what they are looking for in Usenet. When it comes to searching for something, thousands are better than millions, correct?
A newsgroup is like an electronic bulletin board or messaging system. Usenet has thousands and thousands of newsgroups and millions of users. SFF Net is a private, non-propagated news server (that means its newsgroups are not available on Usenet, and Usenet newsgroups are not available on SFF Net) with hundreds of newsgroups and hundreds of users: a much cosier place than Usenet. It is an online community for people who like to read, write, and talk about genre fiction. SFF Net public newsgroups are available to everyone, not just to members of SFF Net and/or SFWA.
