What are Usenet newsgroups?
Usenet News is a worldwide electronic discussion forum. People can exchange information and participate in discussions on a wide variety of topics. They can even exchange pictures, music, and other multimedia content through the alt.binaries newsgroups. Usenet News organizes the discussions into topics called newsgroups. The topics are organized into trees called hierarchies. For example, the rec hierarchy is one of the major collections of topics, featuring recreational topics such as hobbies, sports, and the arts. The rec.arts newsgroups are a sub-hierarchy featuring artistic topics, including such newsgroups as rec.arts.animation and rec.arts.dance, where you will find discussions on animation and dance, respectively. There are newsgroups for jokes, for trading pictures, for serious scientific discussions, for religion, and for almost anything you can think of. Some are global, while others are oriented toward specific countries, states, cities, universities, or organizations. Most
Note that the correct term is “newsgroups”; they are not called areas,bases, boards, bboards, conferences, round tables, SIGs, echoes, rooms or usergroups! Nor, as noted above, are they part of the Internet, though they may reach your site over it. Furthermore, the people who run the news systems are called news administrators, not sysops. If you want to be understood, be accurate. A newsgroup is a discussion about a particular subject consisting of notes written to a central Internet site and redistributed through Usenet, a worldwide network of news discussion groups. Usenet uses the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). Newsgroups are organized into subject hierarchies, with the first few letters of the newsgroup name indicating the major subject category and sub-categories represented by a subtopic name. Many subjects have multiple levels of subtopics. Some major subject categories are: news, rec (recreation), soc (society), sci (science), comp (computers), and so forth (there are
