Newsgroups

USENET contains many newsgroups of interest to the cyber community.

Newsgroups function much like a bulletin board. Messages and replies are posted in a common location for everyone to see. Unlike list servers, posted messages are not mailed to a list of subscribers. Instead, when a message is posted to a newsgroup it is transmitted to every news server that carries the newsgroup. If there are 100 users monitoring a newsgroup on a particular server only one message is transmitted and stored, not 100 as with a mailing list. This is much more efficient.

All messages posted to all news groups carried by your news server must be stored locally by your network service provider. This can consume a large amount of disk space. Therefore, old messages will disappear after a certain time period or when a certain disk space allotment has been exceeded.

Like list servers, when replying to a posting in a newsgroup, you should consider whether your reply is of general interest or not. If your reply is of general interest you should post your reply to the newsgroup. If your reply is not of general interest or of a personal nature you should reply by e-mail to the person who originally posted the message.

One of Usenet's huge collection of topic groups or fora. Usenet groups can be "unmoderated" (anyone can post) or "moderated" (submissions are automatically directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then posts the results). Some newsgroups have parallel mailing lists for Internet people with no netnews access, with postings to the group automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some moderated groups (especially those which are actually gatewayed Internet mailing lists) are distributed as "digests", with groups of postings periodically collected into a single large posting with an index.