Table of Contents

Some Words You Should Know

Figuring Out Newsgroup Names

Understanding Articles and Threads

Let's start with a rundown of a few Usenet terms you'll need to be familiar with:

article An individual message in a newsgroup discussion.

follow up To respond to an article.

hierarchy Usenet divides its discussion groups into several classifications, or hierarchies. There are seven so-called mainstream hierarchies:

comp	Computer hardware and software
misc	Miscellaneous stuff that doesn't really fit anywhere else
news	Usenet-related topics
rec	Entertainment, hobbies, sports, and more
sci	Science and technology
soc	Sex, culture, religion, and politics
talk	Debates about controversial political and cultural topics

Most Usenet-equipped Internet service providers will give you access to all the mainstream hierarchies. There's also a huge alt (alternative) hierarchy that covers just about anything that either doesn't belong in a mainstream hierarchy or is too wacky to be included with the mainstream groups. There are also many smaller hierarchies designed for specific geographic areas. For example, the ba hierarchy includes discussion groups for the San Francisco Bay area, the can hierarchy is devoted to Canadian topics, and so on.

newsgroup Newsgroup (or, often, simply group) is the official Usenet moniker for a discussion topic. Why are they called newsgroups? Well, the original Duke University system was designed to share announcements, research findings, and commentary. In other words, people would use this system if they had some "news" to share with their colleagues. The name stuck, and now you'll often hear Usenet referred to as Netnews or simply as the news.

newsreader The software you use to read a newsgroup's articles and to post your own articles.

post To send an article to a newsgroup.

subscribe In a newsreader, to add a newsgroup to the list of groups you want to read. If you no longer want to read the group, you unsubscribe from the group.

thread A series of articles related to the same Subject line. A thread always begins with an original article and then progresses through one or more follow-ups.

Newsgroup names aren't too hard to understand, but we need to go through the drill to make sure that you're comfortable with them. In their basic guise, newsgroup names have three parts: the hierarchy to which they belong, followed by a dot, followed by the newsgroup's topic. For example, check out the following name: rec.boats

Here, the hierarchy is rec (recreation), and the topic is boats. Sounds simple enough so far. But many newsgroups were too broad for some people, so they started breaking the newsgroups into subgroups. For example, the rec.boats people who were into canoeing got sick of speedboat discussions, so they created their own "paddle" newsgroup. Here's how its official name looks: rec.boats.paddle

You'll see lots of these subgroups in your Usenet travels. (For example, there are also newsgroups named rec.boats.building and rec.boats.racing.) Occasionally, you'll see sub-subgroups, such as soc.culture.african.american, but these are still rare in most hierarchies (the exception is the comp hierarchy, in which you'll find all kinds of these sub-subgroups). One variation on this theme is to tack on extra subgroup names for emphasis. For example, consider the following newsgroup: alt.tv.dinosaur.barney.die.die.die

This newsgroup, of course, is designed for people who don't exactly like TV's Barney the Dinosaur (to put it mildly).

Understanding Articles and Threads

Articles, as you can imagine, are the lifeblood of Usenet. As I mentioned earlier, every day tens of thousands of articles are posted to the different newsgroups. Some newsgroups might get only one or two articles a day, but many get a dozen or two, on average. (And some very popular groups—rec.humor is a good example—can get a hundred or more postings in a day.)

Happily, Usenet places no restrictions on article content. (However, as you'll see shortly, a few newsgroups have moderators who decide whether an article is worth posting.) Unlike, say, the heavily censored America Online chat rooms, Usenet articles are the epitome of free speech. Articles can be as long or short as you like (although extremely long articles are frowned on because they take so long to retrieve), and they can contain whatever ideas, notions, and thoughts you feel like getting off your chest (within the confines of the newsgroup's subject matter). You're free to be inquiring, informative, interesting, infuriating, or even incompetent—it's entirely up to you. (Having said all that, however, I don't want you to get the impression that Usenet is total anarchy. If you want to get along with your fellow newshounds, you should follow a few guidelines. See the section "Some Netiquette Niceties for Usenet," later in the chapter, to get some pointers on minding your Usenet p's and q's.

Earlier I told you that newsgroups were "discussion topics," but that doesn't mean they work like a real-world discussion, where you have immediate conversational give and take. Instead, newsgroup discussions lurch ahead in discrete chunks (articles) and unfold over a relatively long period (sometimes even weeks or months).

To get the flavor of a newsgroup discussion, think of the "Letters to the Editor" section of a newspaper. Someone writes an article in the paper, and later someone else sends in a letter commenting on the content of the article. A few days after that, more letters might come in, such as a rebuttal from the original author, or someone else weighing in with his two cents worth. Eventually, the "discussion" dies out either because the topic has been exhausted or because everyone loses interest.

Newsgroups work in just the same way. Someone posts an article, and then the other people who read the group can, if they like, respond to the article by posting a follow-up article. Others can then respond to the response, and so on down the line. This entire discussion—from the original article to the last response—is called a thread.

The artwork displayed throughout this primer is Copyright © Judd Winick.