Newsgroups (Usenet)

What are Newgroups (Usenet)?

Newsgroups are set up for people with similar interests to discuss the topics they are interested in. You can add your voice to the debates, ask questions, or just read what others have to say. Each discussion group is known as a newsgroup. Participants in these discussions range from individual home users to universities, government departments, and commercial organisations. Unlike e-mail messages which are sent directly to specific individuals or groups of people, news articles are posted to newsgroups and may be read by anybody. The principle is much the same as that of mailing lists, but differs in the following ways.

  • You can choose which messages (postings) to read, so you do not have to download the entire contents of the group.
  • You do not have to subscribe to a newsgroup in order to look at the messages contained in it.

How does it work?

Postings to newsgroups are stored on a news server. When you connect to the news server you can download the list of newsgroups held on that server. Different news servers store different numbers of messages and carry different numbers of newsgroups. Opening a newsgroup directory will reveal more sub directories or specific newgroups (as you can see in the picture below):

Clicking on a specific newsgroup leads to the headers of the messages being shown, and clicking on a specific header will allow you to read that message.

What's a thread?

A thread is a term for a number of postings relating to the same subject. News reading software allows you to organise postings in a number of ways, one of which is by threads, which makes it easier to read all the replies generated by a posting.

Newsgroups are arranged into broad subject headings which are indicated by an abbreviation of the subject area. For example:

  • alt - alternative
  • sci - science
  • rec - recreation
  • comp - computing
  • soc - society
  • clari - news items
  • uk - uk specific
  • talk - discussion
  • misc - topics that do not easily fit into other catagories

Below the top level the headings tend to be more self explanatory (such as rec.woodworking).

A few pointers for using Newsgroups

  • You may wish to spend some time reading the postings to a newsgroup to get an idea of the level of the conversation and the type of subjects discussed. This will also help you avoid asking the same questions that have been asked before.
  • Only post information that is relevant to the newgroup. You may think that the people who post to rec.woodworking want to know how to make kites, but this information may be more relevant to rec.kites
  • Spamming is sending the same message to a number of newsgroups when it is nothing to do with them. For example, get rich quick schemes are a frequent source of spamming, as are advertisements for business services. Spamming only annoys users of the newsgroups.
  • It may take some time for your message to appear on the newsgroup. Posting the same message repeatedly may annoy other readers.
  • Don't include irrelevant information in your postings. Massive signature files and huge repeated messages just mean longer downloads for the people who are reading your posting.
  • Before responding to an article or posting a new one, you may want to familiarise yourself with the guidelines for new users, which can be found in the newsgroup news.announce.newusers.