Short Introduction to Newsgroups

Unfamiliar with Usenet newsgroups? This document and the newsgroups news.announce.newusers and news.newusers.questions will help.

Usenet newsgroups are forums where users post messages for everyone in the world to read. Messages then propagate to machines all over the world, a process which can take a few minutes or a few days. Usenet, then, is not a "real-time" chat forum, but more like a bulletin board, because messages just show up on a news machine and sit there until you read them.

Newsgroups are arranged in hierarchies so that any one topic is easy to find according to category.

Another thing to note about newsgroups is that messages do not necessarily arrive in the order they were posted. You may read someone's answer to a question before the post with the question arrives at your site!

When you post, you should try to remember a few things:

1. Read your newsgroup for a couple of weeks before posting, so you can see what kinds of topics are acceptable for the group. A newsgroup is its own community of people!
2. Look for newsgroups named "announce," "info," and "answers" to find FAQ's (lists of Frequently-Asked Questions) and descriptions of similar newsgroups. Read the FAQ for your newsgroup before posting.
3. Keep quoted lines to a minimum. Add more original material to your message than you're quoting from a previous message.
4. Post to as few newsgroups as possible; in other words, don't crosspost to a lot of groups if only one well-chosen newsgroup will do.

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Copyright (c) 1995 by M. L. Grant