Newsgroup Basics Internet 106

Many people are unfamiliar with Usenet newsgroups. Newsgroups are discussion forums for a massive amount and variety of topics.

There are thousands of newsgroups available through Usenet. Newsgroups are mainly text messages in grouped in certain areas of interest. To view Usenet newsgroups you may use your e-mail program or a third party news viewer. Please see our main help page on how to set up newsgroups through Outlook Express or Netscape.

You may download Free Agent newsreader for Windows or Newswatcher for Macintosh by clicking on the appropriate link.

After opening your E-Mail program, you will need to tell the program the location of the newsgroup server. Often times, this is done when you originally set up your E-Mail program. If not, simply click on "Edit" and then "Preferences" from the drop down menu.

The "preferences" window appears.

Now click on "Newsgroup Servers" in the left column. Next, click the "add" button on the right. In the new window that pops up, type in news.t-one.net and click the "OK" button.

When you go back to your E-Mail program, you will now see a folder called "news", which is your newsgroup (it may also show news.t-one.net). Right click on the name, and choose "subscribe". This will open a new "subscribe" window, which is shown below.

Click on the "New" tab for the newsgroup listings. It may take several minutes for the list to download. Next, click on the "All" tab. Newsgroups have a hierarchical naming architecture, with 8 primary prefixes, "alt" being the most popular. For this lesson, let's choose "alt".

After clicking on the "alt" prefix, thousands of categories are listed. Scroll down the list to find a topic that interests you. Double click on the topic name, then click the "subscribe" button on the right side of the window. Close the "subscribe" window.

Now go back to your E-Mail program and you will see the topic you selected listed under the newsgroup. By clicking on the topic, all the "posts" to that specific newsgroup will appear as if they were new E-Mail messages. When you click on a message, the contents of the message appear in the reader pane as shown in the image below.

Before posting any message, however, you should take some time to become familiar with the newsgroup you intend to post to. Many groups have formal guidelines which describe what is (and is not) appropriate within the group, which are called charters. Also, while pictures, sounds, and video may be transferred over Usenet, such materials are frowned upon outside of the alt.binaries newsgroups.