Usenet News
at UGA
Usenet News
at UGA
UCNS maintains a Usenet News server for the University of Georgia, news.uga.edu. Usenet News is an electronic public forum in which you can participate in discussions and exchange information with millions of people around the world.
For more detailed information on Usenet news:
Note: in order to post to the the UGA news server, your system must be registered in the campus name server. To register your machine, contact your network domain's officially designated Domain Network Liaison (DNL). If you do not know who the DNL for your domain is, you can search the UGA Domain Network Liaisons list. Note this list is accessible only from UGA authorized network addresses.
Overview of Usenet News
The remainder of this page is from a "Computer Review" article
written by Glenn Leavell with minor changes for currency.
Usenet News is a public forum on the Internet computer network for the discussion of an almost endless variety of topics among millions of individuals located around the world. Different people use Usenet News for different reasons. Some people use it for academic research, others use it for recreational purposes, while others use it in pursuit of their various hobbies. The community that makes up Usenet News is vast and diverse. Not everybody on Usenet News is associated with a university or academic institution. You'll also meet many people who work in the private sector and who work for the military. Many of these people live outside the United States.
We'll go into some definitions in detail later, but simply put, the discussions that occur on Usenet News are divided by general topic into what are called "newsgroups." Each submission into a newsgroup is called an "article". The act of submitting an article into a newsgroup is called "posting". This is because submitting an article into a newsgroup is analogous to posting a flyer on a public bulletin board: once you post your article, you can't control who will read it, just as you can't control who will walk by a bulletin board and see your flyer.
Usenet News, then, is a system which allows individuals to post articles into newsgroups and to transfer those articles for others to read all over the world via the Internet computer network. It also allows, of course, for you to read all the articles that other people have posted. When you post an article into the Usenet News system, it winds its way from one news server to the next, until it is eventually stored on all the news servers in the world. This being the case, Usenet News participants in Atlanta may be able to read your article much sooner than participants in France. Also, those reading news here on campus will be able to read your articles almost as soon as your post them.
It is important to note that no central organization owns, controls, or manages Usenet News. In fact, the participants of Usenet News often call it the world's only successful anarchy. The anarchistic trait of Usenet News derives from its distributed nature. Because Usenet News works by simply transferring articles between computers, the only control any individual site has is the control over what articles can come into and what articles can go out of that site. This does not mean that there are no "rules" in Usenet News. Over the years, the Usenet participants have developed a rather extensive set of generally agreed upon conventions. These conventions carry an extreme amount of weight for many of the people who manage Usenet sites around the world. Such conventions include the method one uses to create a brand new newsgroup and the etiquette (often called "netiquette") that should be used when posting articles.
Accessing Usenet -- The news Client
To access the UCNS news server, you will use a piece of
software called a remote news client. A news client
communicates with the news server through the campus network,
allowing you to read, compose, and post news articles. All
of your interaction with the news server will be done through
a news client. Although all news clients will provide you
with the same basic functionality, the way that they provide
this functionality will vary greatly from one type of
computer to the next. For instance, the Unix client won't
look anything like the Macintosh client, but they will both
allow you to read and post articles.
A variety of clients are available for the various types of computers and platforms on campus. The names of several clients are listed below, along with the platform that they support.
tin, rn, trn, pine Various Unix platforms (Sun OS, etc.) Trumpet DOS Trumpet for Windows, pine Microsoft Windows NewsWatcher Macintosh NR/2 - OS/2 (included with base TCP/IP ver 2.0 for OS/2) VMSNews VMS
Many of these packages can be obtained via anonymous FTP from ftp.uga.edu/pub/news. A news client may already be available on your computer system. Ask the person who administers your system for more information. When installing a news client, you will have to know the name of a news server. The name of the UCNS news server is news.uga.edu.
News clients have already been installed and are available for you to use on the ARCHES and CONTAC systems. The ARCHES news client is tin and can be invoked from the ARCHES menus. The CONTAC news client, NNR, can be reached from the CONTAC menus, or by using the nnr command.
What is a Newsgroup?
Usenet News articles are grouped into categories by subject.
These categories are called newsgroups. The newsgroups
themselves are grouped into their own categories, called
"hierarchies." There are seven main hierarchies and several
"alternative" hierarchies. Listed below are the names of the
hierarchies, including brief descriptions of each of them.
The descriptions are copied or adapted from regular Usenet
News postings by Gene Spafford and David Lawrence.
The seven main hierarchies are:
comp Topics of interest to both computer professionals and hobbyists, including topics in computer science, software source, and information on hardware and software systems.
misc Groups addressing themes not easily classified under any of the other headings or which incorporate themes from multiple categories.
news Groups concerned with the news network and software themselves.
rec Groups oriented towards the arts, hobbies and recreational activities.
sci Discussions marked by special and usually practical knowledge, relating to research in or application of the established sciences.
soc Groups primarily addressing social issues and socializing.
talk Groups largely debate-oriented and tending to feature long discussions without resolution and without appreciable amounts of generally useful information.
The UCNS news server also carries several other "alternative" hierarchies:
alt An incredibly diverse collection of newsgroups. Some are quite technical, some are recreational, and some are downright silly. The alt hierarchy is special in Usenet News in that many of the conventions that apply to the other hierarchies don't apply here. Also, many news sites around the world do not receive all the alt groups.
bionet Groups that are of interest to biologists. Contact David Kristofferson biosci@net.bio.net for more details.
gnu Groups that are gated bi-directionally with the mailing lists of the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. GNU (GNU's Not Unix) will be a complete operating system, including application programs, with freely distributable source code.
ieee Groups that concern the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
k12 A collection of conferences devoted to K-12 educational curriculum, language exchanges with native speakers, and classroom-to-classroom projects designed by teachers.
vmsnet Groups that are of interest to VAX/VMS users (but not necessarily VMS-specific). These groups are a project of the VMSnet working group of the VAX SIG of the U.S. Chapter of DECUS (the Digital Equipment Computer User's Society).
Many of the hierarchies described above are again grouped into more specific hierarchies. For instance, there is a rec.arts hierarchy which contains newsgroups for the discussion of the arts in general. One specific newsgroup under the rec.arts hierarchy is rec.arts.tv, where people discuss various topics relating to television. Examples of other newsgroups are comp.unix.aix, sci.engr.civil, and soc.culture.canada. There are currently over 2,000 different newsgroups available on the UCNS news server.
Most news clients allow you to create a customized list of the newsgroups that you frequently read. By creating such a list, you don't have to wade through 2,000 different newsgroups looking for your favorites. The act of putting a newsgroup in your customized list is known as "subscribing" to that newsgroup. The method used to subscribe to a particular newsgroup varies greatly from client to client.
What is an Article?
Aside from allowing you to read the articles that other
people have posted, the main function of a news client is to
allow you to post your own articles for others to read.
Don't let the word article mislead you. Some articles are
quite short, one or two sentences; while others are long
essays. No matter how large or small your submission, it is
still called an article.
An article is divided into two parts: the header and the body. The header contains several "fields." Each field identifies a piece of information regarding the article. The basic fields are:
Newsgroups: Name(s) of the newsgroup(s) to which you intend to post.
Subject: A one line subject describing your article.
Distribution: How far off campus should the article go.
Date: The date and time that the article was posted.
From: Your real name and electronic mail address.
When you post an article, most clients will already know enough information to create the Date: and From: fields for you, but they will prompt you for information regarding the other fields. The method of this prompting will be different, depending on which client you are using. For example, you may use the mouse to point and click on certain information if you are using a Macintosh, while you might have to type most of the information if you are using a Unix client.
Descriptions of the Basic Header
Fields
The Newsgroups: field contains the name of the newsgroup to
which you intend to post your article. You can also send
your article to more than one newsgroup at a time. This is
called "cross-posting". To cross-post an article, fill in
the Newsgroups: field with the names of all the newsgroups to
which you wish to post. Each name should be separated with a
comma and no space. For example:
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv,rec.arts.tv.soaps
It is considered bad netiquette to cross-post an article
without good reason. Before you cross-post, be sure that
your article genuinely belongs to more than one group.
The Subject: field contains a one line description of your article. For example:
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: this week's season premieres
The Distribution: field can be used to limit how far off-campus
your article will travel. The most popular
distributions used on this campus are:
uga The article will not leave the campus. ga The article will not leave the state of Georgia. usa The article will not leave the United States. na The article will not leave North America. world The article will travel as far as possible.If no distribution is specified, most news software will use the world distribution by default. It should be noted that "leaks" exist in many news servers around the world. For instance, if you specify the na distribution, expect that your article will make it to many sites outside North America anyway.
There are several other header fields, but they are optional and for more advanced Usenet News participants.
The body of the article is your composition. It may be a short question, or it may be a long essay. Whatever it is, remember that millions of people all over the world may be reading it. Think before you post!
Local Groups
There are several local groups, which do not leave the
campus. These groups all fall into the uga hierarchy. It is
customary to use the uga distribution when posting to these
groups, although articles posted to those groups will not
leave the campus, no matter what distribution is used.
The common uga groups are:
uga.general General discussion uga.tech Technical (computer) discussion uga.computer-security Discussion of Ethical Use of Computers uga.announce Announcement of events, happenings, etc. uga.announce.ucns Announcements from UCNS about outages uga.test For testing (good place for first posting)There are some other uga groups that departments such as the Computer Science (uga.cs) and English (uga.eng) use in their classes.
There are also several regional hierarchies that are available. They are the ga, ahn, atl, and peachnet hierarchies which are local to Georgia, Athens, Atlanta, and Peachnet (the network of University System schools) respectively. Within these hierarchies, the newsgroups ga.general and atl.general are popular.
Newsgroup Expiration
The amount of disk space required to store all the Usenet
News articles on a news server is very large. For this
reason, no article can stay on the server forever. Instead,
a system of article expiration is used. Once an article
arrives at the server, it is allowed to stay there for a
specified time before the news system software deletes it.
Expiration is done on a per-hierarchy basis.
The following is the current expiration schedule for the UCNS news server. Please note that due to the tremendous amount of disk space that Usenet News requires, this schedule is subject to change.
100 days uga.cs. uga.eng. any other UGA course-related newsgroups30 days news.answers news.newusers.questions news.announce.important
15 days non-course-related uga groups
10 days all other groups
When you post an article to a moderated newsgroup, it is automatically sent via electronic mail to the moderator of that newsgroup. It is the moderator who will actually post the article to the newsgroup, after looking it over. Some moderators will notify you when they receive your article, others will not. Also, some moderators will let you know if they have accepted or rejected your article. Again, others will not.
Most clients will tell you whether a group is moderated, although the way that they do this varies greatly from client to client.
Good Newsgroups for Beginners
There are two newsgroups designed especially for beginning
users of Usenet News. They are news.announce.newusers and
news.newusers.questions. The news.newusers.questions group
is a question and answer forum for new users of Usenet
News. The news.announce.newusers group contains a variety of
periodic postings designed to help explain various aspects of
Usenet News to the beginning user. Some of the most popular
periodic postings are posted by Gene Spafford from Purdue.
They include:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Because of the nature of Usenet News, many newsgroups are
plagued with what are known as "frequently asked questions".
These are questions that tend to crop up in a given newsgroup
on a regular basis. As a service to the Usenet Community
(and because they get annoyed after reading the same
questions over and over), many longtime readers of various
newsgroups have developed lists of these frequently asked
questions (and answers!). If a particular newsgroup has an
FAQ, it will normally be posted to its group on a regular
basis. Be sure to read a group's FAQ before you post what
might be a frequent question. There are also some special
groups which serve as repositories for FAQs. The newsgroup
news.answers should contain all the regularly posted FAQs.
Each hierarchy also has its own repository. For example,
rec.answers contains all the FAQs for the rec newsgroups and
comp.answers contains all the FAQs for the comp newsgroups.
(FAQ Some pronounce this as though it were a word -- "fak"
-- while others sound out each letter -- F-A-Q.)
Replying to an Article
After you read a particular Usenet News article, you may wish
to reply to it. There are two methods of replying: you can
reply via electronic mail directly to the person who wrote
the article, or you can reply back to the entire newsgroup to
which the article was posted. To distinguish between these
two methods, the act of replying back to the entire newsgroup
is called "following-up" on an article, while the act of
sending electronic mail directly to the author of the
original article is simply called "replying".
When you follow up on an article that was cross-posted, keep in mind that, by default, your follow-up article will be posted back to all the groups where the original article appeared.
When replying or following-up on an article, many news clients allow you to include a copy of the original article in your new article. This is called "quoting" the original article. When quoting, it is a good idea to edit the original article so that the quoted material is as short as possible. It is also customary to put a special character before the quoted lines in your article. The most common character for this is probably the > character. Many news clients will prepend this character before each quoted line for you. Most clients will also allow you to select your preference for the quote character.
Threads
If several people follow up on an article and then follow-up
on those follow-up articles, a "thread" is created. So, a
thread is simply a collection of articles, all dealing with
the same subject. Given the nature of Usenet News, threads
are very common.
When you follow up on an article, most news clients will automatically use the subject of the original article as the subject of your new article. To indicate that the follow-up article is part of a thread, most clients will also put the term Re: in front of the subject description.
Canceling an Article
Some news clients allow you the ability to "cancel" an
article after you have posted it. When you cancel an
article, a special article is sent out to all the news
servers which received your original article requesting that
it be deleted from the system. You can only cancel your own
articles. By the time that you cancel an article, many
people may have already read it, so don't rely on the cancel
feature as an alternative to proofreading.
Netiquette
Some good manners of using Usenet News have developed over
the years. These rules are called "netiquette". Here are a
few of those rules:
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