Usenet News

By Pauline M. Berry

Another form of electronic discussion group, in addition to mailing lists, can be found through a special network called USENET, also known as Netnews. Netnews originated on UNIX based systems as a way of exchanging information in a common areas but is now widely available on other machines. Usenet is a set of machines that exchange articles tagged with one or more universally recognised labels: the "newsgroups". It is a strange set up, and has no central controlling authority. Each site has its own administrator and to gain access to the USENET a site must link into another site which has USENET access.

Usenet is not an organisation. There is a vague notion of upstream and down stream in the sense that an upstream site will decide what traffic it forwards to downstream sites. Thus, upstream sites have influence over downstream sites. Therefore USENET is not fair.

Information on netnews is divided up into newsgroups which cover specific areas of interests. There are thousands of newsgroups, although not every system receives every newsgroup. The newsgroups are arranged hierarchically under several major topics: Here are some of the major topic areas:

alt
Alternative newsgroups, often used as a testing round for new newsgroups
comp
Computer related topics. Hardware, software, operating systems and protocols are included in this area
gnu
Newsgroups covering software from the Free Software Foundation
misc
Miscellaneous newsgroups
news
Newsgroups about news
sci
Science related newsgroups
soc
Newsgroups covering aspects of sociology
uk
Newsgroups within the UK covering topics of interest within the UK
Like a tree these hierarchies of newsgroups have many branches. For example, comp.protocols.tcp-ip discusses the TCP/IP protocol, rec.juggling is devoted to people who juggle. The traffic on one newsgroup often becomes to heavy or too diverse and the group splits. For example, a newsgroup discussing the job market in the UK, uk.jobs, recently split into three sub groups uk.jobs.offered, uk.jobs.wanted and uk.jobs.general. There are many ways to run the netnews, check your administrator to see what news program is available on your system and how to run it.

There is a whole set of traditions and rules about how to use the newsnet called netiquette. For example, to set up a new news group (not under alt) you must follow a strict set of guidelines. This involves posting an announcement in various groups, holding a discussion, taking a vote and if sufficient users agree setting up the new group.

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