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Say you have an overwhelming
passion for rose gardening. (Just imagine here that you do.) How do you find
other rose gardeners to swap tips with and brag to? Easy: join a newsgroup.
Newsgroups are publicly posted
discussion forums--kind of an electronic clubhouse for people with shared
interests. The messages are presented in a list, known as a thread, that
shows the original message, the responses to the message, and the responses to
the responses, so that you can follow an entire conversation or just the parts
you're interested in.
Your browser alone won't let
you get to Newsgroups. You can read and post messages using either standalone
newsreader software, such as Forté's
Free
Agent, or a newsreader that's a separate part of a Web browser package,
such as Netscape's Collabra or Microsoft's Outlook Express.
Your newsreader lets you check
Newsgroups the way your browser lets you surf Web sites. The Usenet is the
world's largest collection of public Newsgroups. The Newsgroups go by a complex
set of abbreviated names, with the first set of letters of a newsgroup's name
indicating its primary subject, such as rec (recreation), soc
(society), or comp (computers). Additional abbreviations are separated
by full stops and are tacked on to indicate subtopics. It's not uncommon for an
individual newsgroup to have five, six, or more elements in its name. For
example, microsoft.public.inetexplorer.ie4.setup is a newsgroup devoted to
people who want to set up Internet Explorer 4.0.
The messages in Newsgroups are
stored on news servers owned by ISPs, universities, companies, and other large
entities all over the world. Most news servers keep only the more recent posts;
they'd soon run out of storage space otherwise.
What happens if you can't find
a newsgroup that covers your favourite topic? (Not rose gardening--there are
plenty for that.) Well, you could create a new newsgroup--but not without a
little effort. If you want your group to be a standard Usenet newsgroup (those
whose names begin with comp, misc, news, rec, soc, sci, and
talk), you must submit a highly bureaucratic document, called a Request
For Discussion (RFD), to the news.groups newsgroup. The group then organizes a
straw vote where anybody who wants to can vote on your proposal. (To find out
more about the RFD process and how to write an RFD proposal, see Jon Bell's
Creating New Newsgroups page.)
The alt newsgroup hierarchy
was created because many people felt it was too difficult to create an ordinary
newsgroup. (Contrary to popular belief, alt does not mean "alternative
topics"; it means "alternative newsgroup management structure.") If you want to
create a newsgroup without all the hassle, you post a suggestion in the
alt.config newsgroup and leave it up to the news administrators--the ones who
make the ultimate decision about carrying new alt Newsgroups. For a guide to
creating an alt newsgroup, read David Barr's
So You Want to Create an Alt Newsgroup.
There are also such things as
local and private Newsgroups. A discussion group created on a corporate
intranet is an example of a private newsgroup. Most ISPs offer a handful of
local Newsgroups where they make tech support announcements that no one but
their customers would want to see. |
