Understanding Newsgroups

PCQ Bureau

01 Apr 1999 09:11 IST

New Update

You are trying to configure the latest palmtop that your

friend got for you from abroad. No one else you know has a similar model. And calling up

the companies help desk abroad is going to be terribly expensive. So what do you do?

Advertisment

Search the newsgroups–an online discussion group or a

virtual community of people with similar interests. More likely than not, someone

somewhere would have faced the same problem and might have posted a solution. If not, find

a newsgroup that discusses a similar topic and post your question. Chances are that you

would get your answer pretty soon.

Origin of newsgoups

Usenet News (User Network News), as newsgroups are

officially known, was born in 1979 when two graduate students–Tom Truscott and Jim

Ellis–thought of connecting machines for the purpose of information exchange among

Unix users. They set up a small network of three machines in North Carolina. Today, there

are over 20,000 different newsgroups organized around every topic imaginable. Humor,

movies, culture, news, computers, creativity, books, music, science, research,

environment, business announcements, animals…you name it and there’s at least

one newsgroup covering it.

Advertisment

size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Common categories of newsgroups
alt	For alternative. Anybody can start a group under alt. This is perhaps the largest and the most varied in terms of the subjects covered. alt.humor is a newsgroup where you can read and post jokes. "alt.movies.indian" is where you can find people’s opinions and comments on Indian movies and so on.
biz	This is about business. For example, "biz.comp.hardware" is the place to advertise for selling computer hardware.
comp	This group is related to computers . "comp.edu.languages" is a group of people interested in different computer languages.
news	This is related to Usenet and all sorts of announcements, advice regarding newsgroups can be posted and received from here.
soc	This stands for "social". "soc.culture.indian" is the place to talk about Indian culture.
sci	This is related to science. "sci.research" is the group where you can find discussions about various researches going on in the field of science.
rec	This is for recreation and you can talk of music or your pets or anything recreational. For example, "rec.music.indian.classical" is, as the name suggests, for taking and being heard about Indian classical music.
misc	Anything which doesn’t fit anywhere fits in this group. For example, in "misc.books.technical" you can read and write about all sorts of technical books.

In order to make them easily recognizable, newsgroups

follow a standard naming convention. The name of a newsgroup starts with a category type,

followed by a dot and a subject, which can be followed by any number of subcategories,

each separated by a dot. For example, "news.announce.newusers" is a group in the

category "news" featuring announcements for new users, while

"alt.movies.indian" is a subgroup of the movies newsgroup dealing with Indian

movies. This falls under the category "alternate"(see the box "Common

Categories of Newsgroups").

Newsgroups can be divided into two

categories–discussion groups and electronic journals. Discussion groups allow

multi-directional postings and anybody can join in any time. Most of the newsgroups listed

above are discussion groups. Electronic journals allow one-way communication only and only

the person or the organization that starts the newsgroup can post messages to it. No

individual postings are allowed. The "americast" hierarchy is an example of

e-journals.

Advertisment

Newsgroups

or mailing lists?

Newsgroups differ from

mailing lists in number of ways.

You receive all the messages posted to a mailing

list. But in case of a newsgroup, the subscriber can choose his topic of interest, and

thus the messages to browse, without receiving each post.
Mailing lists messages exist in your

mailboxe, newsgroup

posts get sent to your news server, you can then enter a group, and the newsreader

downloads just the message headers in the news folder. The messages themselves, however,

are not on your machine. As you access a particular message, the newsreader gets it from

the server at that moment. When you finish reading a message, it’s not stored on your

machine, unless you save it specifically.
Unlike mailing lists, in a newsgroup, if you use a

"threaded" newsreader, then the messages in it show up in a logical

order–replies to a particular post show up under that post, in a thread.
You can post a message to either the newsgroup, reply to the

author of a message or to both simultaneously. But in a mailing list, you can only post

messages to the entire group.

Another way of classifying newsgroups is according to the

type of control–as moderated or unmoderated newsgroups. In moderated newsgroups there

is a moderator who goes through all the messages posted and decides whether they are

eligible to be forwarded to the group or not. Obviously, this becomes impossible for large

groups with heavy volume of messages. Unmoderated newsgroups are open to all and anybody

can join and post whatever they want, and no moderator checks the messages here. The

"whatever they want" is not strictly true as members of newsgroups invariably

set up informal rules of decency and topics that can be posted. The "alt"

hierarchy is a typical example of this type. Some newsgroups are "by invitation

only". That is, only the invited people (by the moderator) can join in.

Newsgroups

through Internet Explorer

Open Outlook Express and select Go>News.
The "Internet Connection Wizard" appears and asks

for a name by which you would like to be known while posting to a newsgroup.
Type a name and in the next dialog box type an e-mail

address where you would like to receive replies from the newsgroup members.
In the next dialog box type in the name of your news server

like, "news.vsnl.net.in" if VSNL is your Internet provider.
After this, it’ll ask for a friendly name for the news

server, by which it’ll appear in your Outlook.
The last dialog box asks for your connection type giving you

a choice between a phone line, a LAN and a manual connection.

That is it. You’ll now see the friendly name of your

news server added to the bottom of your Outlook Express’s folder tree.

Now to subscribe to a newsgroup, right click the news

server folder and select "newsgroups". This will tell you that you’re not

subscribed to any newsgroup and will ask whether you’d like to subscribe to one.

Click on OK to start the downloading process.

Once the list is downloaded, click on any newsgroup and the

"subscribe" button to subscribe to it.

To post a message to a newsgroup, select the newsgroup from

your news folder. Select the header of the message to which you want to reply to, open the

Compose menu and select from: reply to author, reply to newsgroup or reply to newsgroup

and author. You can now send your message just like an ordinary mail.

Advertisment

Servers called "news servers" host newsgroups and

keep a record of the messages posted on them. NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) is the

protocol used by the servers and the news clients. News servers are also known as NNTP

servers, for example, "news.vsnl. net.in" is VSNL’s news server. This is

the place from where you can download the list of newsgroups. Subscribe to a few and soon

you’ll be flooded with postings from all corners of the globe. So be careful and

don’t just go on selecting every other newsgroup for subscription.

By now, it should be clear that newsgroups are about

opinions than about news as in newspaper. To access a newsgroups, that is to read all

messages posted to the group and to post messages yourselves, you need a software called

newsreader. The latest versions of major browsers, such as IE and Netscape, have built-in

newsreaders.

Newsgroups

through Netscape Navigator

Netscape Navigator 4.05

Newsgroups are called discussion groups in the Netscape

Navigator. Select Communicator>Collabra Discussion Groups.
In the "Netscape Message Center" window click on

"subscribe" in the toolbar.
Click on the "Add Server" button and type in the

news server like, "news.vsnl.net.in" if VSNL is your Internet provider.
This will start downloading a list of newsgroups from your

news server.
Once the list is downloaded, you can click on any newsgroup

then click the "subscribe" button.

Netscape Navigator 4.5

Select Communicator>Newsgroups.

Right click the News folder that appears in your folder

tree.

Click on the Subscribe to newsgroups option.

Click on Add Server button in the window that appears and

select News Server from the Add Server dialog box and click on Continue button.

Enter the news server name, that is,

"news.vsnl.net.in" and click OK.

This will start downloading a list of newsgroups. Click on

"subscribe" button to subscribe to any newsgroup you want.

To post a message to a newsgroup, double click a group from

the list in your news folder and select the mail you want to reply to. Click on the Reply

menu and select from: reply to sender, reply to group, or reply to sender and group. And

send the message as an ordinary mail.

You can use search engines, such as href="http://infoseek.com">infoseek.com and yahoo.com,

too to subscribe to newsgroups—click on any newsgroup listed in it. href="http://dejanews.com">dejanews.com is also good for the purpose. It’s

set up like a Web search engine, except that it searches exclusively for newsgroups and

their contents. Here you can also search for a message or a keyword across the various

newsgroups. For India-related newsgroups use khoj.com

and indiatime.com.f

You can also use specialized newsreader software like

"NewsWatcher" for the Mac or "NewsFerret" for Windows. (Both these are

available on this month’s PCQ CD).

Advertisment