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		~ Usenet and Newsgroups ~

Usenet is not part of the World Wide Web, it has been around a lot longer than that, but like the Web it uses the Internet as a host for its services. Usenet was set up by two students at Duke University to allow students to upload a message to a public server where other people could see them and reply. As the university was connected to the forerunner of the Internet all US universities had access to it and it proved popular even with non-computer types.

To make life easier they set it up so people could set up a 'news group' for a particular topic (there are currently over a hundred thousand such groups). The original idea was to allow students to engage in discussion and exchange news, hence the term 'newsgroup'.

Each newsgroup has a name, made up of words separated by a full stop. For example uk.rec.cycling is a group for British recreational cyclists, uk.rec.models.rail is a British railway modelling group and alt.binaries.images.vintage-engineering is a group where people put up photographs of old machinery. The alt. bit was originally to indicate a group that didn't fit into the established naming conventions. As an example computer groups were usually called comp.something but alt.comp.freeware is a group where people discuss freeware programs.

Originally intended for simple text messages it wasn't long before someone though of a way of encoding pictures and other binary files such as programs. To do this the newsgroup has to be set up to handle them and the newsgroup name will have the work .binaries. in it.

To use the system the individual requires a small 'news reader' program on their machine, most e-mail programs (such as Outlook Express) include a newsgroup reader. The replies are appended to the original 'post' and in most news reader programs they appear as a 'thread', making it easy to hold a discussion on a particular topic.

The screenshot shown below is the Windows Mail program running under Vista and shows a typical news group in use.



This may seem to be a description of 'forums' on the World Wide Web, but Usenet pre-dates the Web and it is (in our opinion) superior to web forums, mainly because of the clumsy navigation methods required by a web based service. Usenet was designed from the ground up for the job, web forums are a bolt on idea and have a long way to go before they can match the ease of use of Usenet.

You can access Usenet, after a fashion, using the World Wide Web (for example Google has the 'Google Groups' option in its search options), however web access is typically to text based groups only and web access is generally very clumsy.

Usenet does not carry advertising, so there is no way to make money from it (posting adverts on news groups is generally frowned upon). Budget ISPs now no longer offer Usenet access as standard, which is not a bad thing because when AOL added Usenet to its services (trying to pass it off as part of AOL) great hordes of adolescents descended on the groups, mainly to exchange insults. If your ISP does offer Usenet services (Madasafish and Virgin are two of the larger ISPs that do) they will have given you a NNTP address, typically this will be something like news.yourisp.com. You enter this into your news reader program (your e-mail program should have the facility) and the system will download the list of news groups that your server has access to, typically a hundred thousand or so. Typically you will then type a key word into a search box to see a list of all the news group names that contain that word, often there will be a large number of these. You select the ones you like the name of then look through them to see what is going on. Those you like you keep, those you do not like you simply 'unsubscribe'. You then end up with a list of the groups you wist to follow, typically clicking on this list opens the associated group where you can read and reply to the posts.

The Usenet system soon evolved something called Netiquette, a set of rules on posting (for example WRITING IN CAPITALS indicates you are shouting) and Usenet is also the origin of the 'emoticon' such as :-) and :-0. People who continually annoy others, or deliberately try and start arguments are called Trolls, standard practice is never to reply to a post from a Troll. If someone annoys you you can block their posts so you never see them (many Trolls are just talking to themselves as everyone in the group will have blocked them). One small point that people get worked up about is 'top posting'. The rules are that when you reply to a post you just add your bit to the end of the last message, this is because messages are only stored for a set period of time. So if someone puts up a question and three months later you answer it, the original post may then be deleted as 'out of date' but yours will remain. This is an extreme example but some 'threads have lasted over a year discussing some topic or other and that is why you should leave the message you are replying to in your post. Adding your reply to the top of the post, before the message to which you are replying, is considered bad form.

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Usenet Access providers Free Options



Paid For Options

Giganews offers a range of packages, the least expensive being about £2 per month, Claims to fame include this aggressive pricing and long retention (text posts over 2000 days, binary images nearly 2 years).
Giganews main website

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