Feel free to experiment or try to relive the glory days, but Usenet is, alas, well
past its prime.
The concept of newsgroups revolutionized the way information was
exchanged between people across a network. The Usenet network news
system created a method for people to electronically communicate with large
groups of people with similar interests. Many of the concepts of Usenet news
are embodied in other forms of collaborative communication.
Usenet newsgroups act as a form of public bulletin board system. Any user
can subscribe to individual newsgroups and send (or post) messages (called
articles) to the newsgroup so that all the other subscribers of the newsgroup
can read them. Some newsgroups include an administrator, who must approve
each message before it is posted. These are called moderated newsgroups.
Other newsgroups are open, allowing any subscribed member to post a
message. When an article is posted to the newsgroup, it is transferred to all
the other hosts in the news network.
Usenet newsgroups are divided into a hierarchy to make it easier to find
individual ones. The hierarchy levels are based on topics, such as computers,
science, recreation, and social issues. Each newsgroup is named as a subset of
the higher-level topic. For example, the newsgroup comp relates to all
computer topics. The newsgroup comp.laptops relates to laptop computer
issues. Often the hierarchy goes several layers deep. For example, the
newsgroup comp.databases.oracle.server relates to Oracle server
database issues.
NOTE
The format of newsgroup articles follows the strict guidelines defined in
the Internet standards document Request for Comments (RFC) 1036. Each
article must contain two distinct parts: header lines and a message body.
The header lines identify information about when and by whom the article
was posted. The body of the message should contain only standard ASCII
text characters. No binary characters or files should be posted within news
articles. To get around this restriction, binary files are converted to text data
through the use of either the standard UNIX uuencode program or the
newer Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol. The
resulting text file is posted to the newsgroup. Newsgroup readers can then
decode the posted text file back into its original binary form.A collection of articles posted in response to a common topic is called a
thread. A thread can contain many articles as users post messages in response
to other posted messages. Some newsreader programs allow users to track