Newsgroups

What are Newsgroups? Newsgroups (also known as News or Usenet news) provide an open means of text-based communication for global discussions. Newsgroups are subject based and there are many thousands of newsgroups in existence.

The names of the newsgroups incorporate a sort of hierarchical subject classification scheme. At the top level there are broad subject categories, some of which are listed below:

comp

computer hardware, software, and languages

sci

science, from popular to research level

soc

cultures and current events around the world

misc

miscellaneous topics

There are a number of top-level alternative groups, such as:

alt

frivolous or controversial topics

bionet

learned discussions among research biologists

biz

business and commercial topics

Within each category, further subdivisions by subject describe exactly what the discussion is about. Thus, there are many further subgroups of these main top-level groups, and subgroups of the subgroups. For instance, a self-explanatory example would be misc.health.diabetes.

How to use Newsgroups

News is distributed to thousands of computers (news hosts) around the world. Each news host will decide which newsgroups are relevant or appropriate for their site, and may decide to filter out some of the more extreme/offensive ones.

Newsgroups are accessed through client software called a newsreader, which are now built in to many web browsers. These applications must be correctly-configured to point to a news host, usually the one at your institution or the one specified by your ISP. This will provide an interface between your computer and the computer where News is actually held, enabling you to select which newsgroups you would like to view and to post messages to them. They will also keep track of which articles you have read. From the user's point of view, one of the potential advantages of newsgroups over mailing lists, newsgroup messages wait for you to come to them, rather than constantly arriving in your mailbox.

Newsgroups do not require a subscription, so anyone can post a message (an article) to make announcements, ask for answers to problems, air opinions and so-on. Note however that this also means that Newsgroups are unregulated, and there is no control over what is posted.

At any one time there are tens of thousands of newsgroups (but many may have very few messages in them). Within each of these newsgroups, there are likely to be multiple discussions going on at the same time. Responses to a posted article are grouped with that article in what is known as a thread. You can follow the trail of discussion on a specific topic by following the thread, although articles will generally expire after a period (usually a few days).

News as an information resource

The pool of expertise and knowledge which News postings represent can yield valuable information. News can have the most up-to-date information available on current events. It is also a means of requesting help from the networking community. If you are reading News on a day-to-day basis, you will probably find that while it can be a useful resource, this isn't always so. You need to judge for yourself whether the time spent browsing is justified by the rewards gained.

An alternative is therefore to search News retrospectively for specific information. Your newsreader may provide you with an option to search through the complete list of newsgroups. Alternatively, there are some publicly available services which enable you to search for a newsgroup, or search newsgroup archives, or search for people who post to News.

As thousands of articles are posted every day to News, just a few days' accumulation will occupy a considerable amount of filespace. This means that articles are not held for very long, so retrospective coverage is usually limited. The Google Groups service offers a searchable interface to indexed archives of Usenet news postings.