To get your Usenet education off on the right foot,
this section looks at a few crucial concepts that will serve as the base
from which you can explore the rest of Usenet:
| article | An individual message in a newsgroup discussion. |
| follow up | To respond to an article. (Also: follow-up; the response itself.) |
| hierarchy | Usenet divides its discussion groups into several classifications, or hierarchies. |
| | There are several so-called mainstream hierarchies: |
| | biz | Business |
| | comp | Computer hardware and software |
| | misc | Miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t really fit anywhere else |
| | news | Usenet-related topics |
| | rec | Entertainment, hobbies, sports, and more |
| | sci | Science and technology |
| | soc | Sex, culture, religion, and politics |
| | talk | Debates about controversial political and cultural topics |
Most Usenet-equipped
Internet service providers will give you access to all the mainstream
hierarchies. There’s also a huge alt (alternative) hierarchy that covers
just about anything that either doesn’t belong in a mainstream
hierarchy or is too wacky to be included with the mainstream groups.
There are also many smaller hierarchies designed for specific geographic
areas. For example, the ba hierarchy includes discussion groups for the
San Francisco Bay area, the can hierarchy is devoted to Canadian
topics, and so on.
| newsgroup | This
is the official Usenet moniker for a discussion topic. Why are they
called newsgroups? Well, the original Duke University system was
designed to share announcements, research findings, and commentary. In
other words, people would use this system if they had some “news” to
share with their colleagues. The name stuck, and now you’ll often hear Usenet referred to as Netnews or simply as the news. |
| newsreader | The
software you use to read a newsgroup’s articles and to post your own
articles. In Windows XP, you can use Outlook Express as a newsreader.
Other Windows newsreaders include Agent (www.forteinc.com/agent/) and NewsPro (www.netwu.com/newspro/). For the Mac, you can try Microsoft Entourage, part of the Office 2004 suite, or MT-NewsWatcher (www.smfr.org/mtnw/). |
Note
Instead of using a newsreader, you can access all the newsgroups through your web browser by using Google Groups (groups.google.com).
This is useful if your ISP does not offer newsgroup access or if you
would like to read particular newsgroups without having to subscribe to
them. However, if you want to post messages to a newsgroup, you must
register with Google.
| news server (or NNTP server) | A
computer that stores newsgroups and handles requests to post and
download newsgroup messages. There are four types of news server:ISP
news server—Most ISPs supply you with an account on their news server
in addition to your email account. Your news server username and
password are almost always the same as your email username and password,
but check with your ISP. You should also confirm the Internet name of
the ISP’s news server. This name usually takes the form news.ispname.com or nntp.ispname.com, where ispname is the name of your ISP. Commercial
news server—If your ISP does not offer newsgroup access, or if your ISP
offers only a limited number of groups, consider using a commercial
news server, which offers newsgroup access for a fee. Two of the largest
commercial news servers are Giganews (www.giganews.com) and Newscene (www.newscene.com). Public
news server—If you are on a limited budget, try a public news server
that offers free newsgroup access. Note, however, that most public
servers restrict the number of users on the server, offer a limited
number of groups, or place a cap on the amount you can download. For a
list of public news servers, try Newzbot (www.newzbot.com) or Free Usenet News Servers (freenews.maxbaud.net). Semi-private
news server—Some companies maintain their own news server and their own
set of newsgroups. For example, Microsoft maintains a news server at msnews.microsoft.com that runs more than 2,000 groups related to Microsoft products and technologies.
|
| post | To send an article to a newsgroup. |
| subscribe | In
a newsreader, to add a newsgroup to the list of groups you want to
read. If you no longer want to read the group, you unsubscribe from the
group. |
| thread | A
series of articles related to the same subject line. A thread always
begins with an original article and then progresses through one or more
follow-ups. |
Figuring Out Newsgroup Names
Newsgroup names
aren’t too hard to understand, but we need to go through the drill to
make sure that you’re comfortable with them. In their basic guise,
newsgroup names have three parts: the hierarchy to which they belong,
followed by a dot, followed by the newsgroup’s topic. For example, check
out the following name:
rec.boats
Here, the hierarchy is rec
(recreation), and the topic is boats. Sounds simple enough so far. But
many newsgroups were too broad for some people, so they started breaking
the newsgroups into subgroups. For example, the rec.boats people who
were into canoeing got sick of speedboat discussions, so they created
their own paddle newsgroup. Here’s how its official name looks:
rec.boats.paddle
You’ll see lots of these
subgroups in your Usenet travels. (For example, there are also
newsgroups named rec.boats.building and rec.boats.racing.) Occasionally,
you’ll see sub-subgroups, such as soc.culture.african.american, but
these are still rare in most hierarchies (the exception is the comp
hierarchy, in which you’ll find all kinds of these sub-subgroups).
