Many people have used bulletin board systems (BBS) as a forum for discussion about whatever specialist topics come under the particular BBS remit. The idea behind Usenet News is that it should provide this bulletin board discussion facility, but on a world wide basis and with a huge number of discussion topics.
Discussion topics are called news grnups and, using a news reader program, you can post your contributions to news groups and read other users' questions and comments.
In order to participate in network news, you need to know the hostname of a news server machine to which you can connect with your news reader. The news servers are machines connected to the news system which receive, on a regular basis, all the news updates from around the world. All the news articles received by the server are stored by it on local disk storage and from there made available to you via your news reader program.
As there are literally thousands of news groups, it means that network news articles arrive at a rate of many mega- bytes per day - far too much for any individual to keep up with. With news arriving at this rate, it requires a fairly sizeable storage space to keep it in and, even then, most news sites can only afford to keep all the news for a few weeks before removing it from the system to make space for new arrivals. The length of time that the news remains available and the range of news groups offered at a particular site are both controlled by the site administrator.
There are two types of news group called moderated and unmoderated. As name implies, a moderated news group has a moderator associated with it, to whom all postings for the news group should be sent. It is the moderator's task to screen all postings to the news group to ensure that they are appropriate, before passsing them on to the news group itself. In an unmoderated news group, postings are not screened, so thnt these news groups contain more open and uncensored discussions. The news groups are organized into hierarchies under several top level categegories some of which are:
alt alternative/miscellaneous discussions; comp computing discussions; rec recreation; sci science topics.
Underneath each of the main category headings there are several subcategories. For example, two of the subcategories under comp are:
comp. lang programming languages; comp. Os operating systems.
Each subcategory can be further subdivided until, eventually, the names of individual news groups are reached, such as:
comp. lang. c C programming language discussions; comp.os. linux. announce special announcements for Linux users.
A good news reader (my personal favorite) available for Linux is called tin. This program has a very similar user interface to the elm mail reader we mentioned earlier. In order to use tin to connect to a remote news server you should use the following commands:
$ export NNTPSERVER=your.news.hostname $ tin -r
where you will obviously substitute your.news.hostnane with the hostname of the machine which will provide your news service.
When you first use network news via a news reader program, it will create a file in your home directory, typically called .newsrc, which contains a list of all the news groups currently available to you and a flag for each group listed to say whether or not you currently subscribe to that group.
It is very easy when you first join a news group to want to get up to speed as fast as possible. This usually tempts you to post all sorts of questions to the news group, many of which are likely to be the same beginners' questions everyone else asks. In order to avoid annoying others with trivial questions and to reduce the number of postings to the news in general, most news groups have a document which is frequently updated and posted on a regular basis (perhaps once per fortnight or once per month) called the FAQ, which stands for frequently asked questions. Before you post any question to a news group you should always check to see if the answer is contained in that news group's FAQ or in any of the commonly available documents in the area. Failure to do this may well result in you receiving lots of mail (flames) explaining the error of your ways and probably suggesting that you RTFM (read the fine manual).