What are Newsgroups?
Newsgroups are Internet discussion forums where groups of users with common interests gather to talk about everything from software to comic books to politics. Unlike e‑mail messages, which are visible only to the sender and specified recipients, newsgroup messages can be read by anyone who views the group that they’re posted in. Newsgroups are international in scope, with participants from all corners of the Internet. Before you can view messages in a newsgroup, you’ll need a newsreader program, such as Windows Mail. You’ll use the newsreader to download messages from a news server. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer access to news servers for use by their customers. These servers typically contain thousands of groups covering a wide variety of topics. Some news servers contain specialized topics. For example, the Microsoft Help Groups news server found at news.microsoft.com offers newsgroups dedicated to Microsoft products.
Say you have an overwhelming passion for rose gardening. (Just imagine here that you do.) How do you find rose gardeners to swap tips with and brag to? Easy: join a newsgroup. Newsgroups are publicly posted discussion forums–kind of an electronic clubhouse for people with shared interests. The messages are presented in a list, known as a thread, that shows the original message, the responses to the message and the responses to the responses, so that you can follow an entire converation or just the parts you’re interested in. Your browser alone won’t let you get to newsgroups. You can read and post messages using either standalone newsreader software such as Forte’s Free Agent, or a newsreader that’s seperate part of a Web browser package, such as Microsoft’s Outlook Express. Your newsreader lets you check newsgroups the way your browser lets you surf Web sites. The Usenet is the world’s largest collection of public newsgroups. The newsgroups go by a complex set of abbreviated names, w
Newsgroups are a discussion forum — something like this site, except much older, plain text only. Most of the newsgroups are not moderated, which means that you get some “interesting” flame wars. Here, those are moved to “rants and raves” where they quickly die out. The quality is spotty. But there are some excellent newsgroups. If you fire up your newsreader, it will probably start by downloading the list of available newsgroups. The list is gigantic. My “.newsgroups” file lists 28272 of them, but I suspect there are many more since I have not updated it for several months. I mainly follow a bunch of comp.* and sci.* newsgroups, and a few sbcglobal.* .
