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The Newsgroups are Internet's equivalent of newspapers or magazines to publish articles of interest to a wide audience. The part of Internet that processes and handles the newsgroups is called Usenet. In it's formative years, it was a way college students and professors could quickly publish their work to other universities and government research agencies. Usenet has now evolved into over 35,000 topic oriented forums where people can discuss virtually anything.
The newsgroups are different than what you are used to seeing as E-Mail or Mailing Lists. When messages are posted to a newsgroup, a copy is sent to each news server that system is connected to. They in turn relay copies to the news servers they exchange messages with until every system all around the World has a copy. Each news server stores the messages for the newsgroups they wish to carry on their system for retrieval. The messages for some newsgroups are only saved for a day or so, others are stored up to 30 days. A few systems like Dejanews.com, save the messages much longer. Moderated newsgroups work a little differently. There, messages posted to the newsgroup are converted to E-Mail and sent to the moderator for review. If it suits the editorial policy for the newsgroup, the moderator posts the message for normal distribution. When you subscribe to a newsgroup, the messages are already there on your Internet provider's system waiting for you. To reach the same number of potential readers with mailing lists would cause the whole Internet system to crash. This is just one of the many reasons bulk E-Mail is called a "Theft of Resources". It ignores the fact another very efficient method of broad distribution already exists and is ideally optional. Usenet is divided into hierarchies such as alt.*, biz.*, comp.*, misc.* and dozens of others. Each hierarchy has it's own set of procedures and group of volunteers to oversee its operation. The alt (Alternative) hierarchy is very open and almost anything is okay. On the other end of the scale, biz is tightly controlled. The rest fall somewhere in between. The biz hierarchy is organized somewhat like a newspaper. There are newsgroups for discussions (Letters to the Editor) and other newsgroups which are divided somewhat like the classified section. Some serve somewhere in between with advertising mixed with exchanging questions and answers. If I've missed at item you'd like to know about newsgroups, please let me know and I'll continue expanding this page.
Chris Gunn |
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