Received: from SOUTH-STATION-ANNEX.MIT.EDU by po6.MIT.EDU (5.61/4.7) id AA06930; Wed, 14 Sep 94 14:02:54 EDT Received: from chinook.halcyon.com by MIT.EDU with SMTP id AA26153; Wed, 14 Sep 94 14:02:06 EDT Received: by halcyon.com id AA02536 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for Joseph Wang ); Wed, 14 Sep 1994 11:00:13 -0700 Date: Wed, 14 Sep 1994 11:00:12 -0700 (PDT) From: Sanford Morton To: GNA_Inet_Consultants Cc: Joseph Wang Subject: Draft for Basic News Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Basic News Introduction to the Internet Globewide Network Academy, Inc. Macvicar School of Education and Technology 14 Sept 94 WHAT IS NEWS? Suppose you have a question: why do you have to let bread dough rise twice, or what's the cylinder firing sequence on a '57 Chevy, or how do I get my fancy modem to connect at 14.4k baud, or how much does Roseanne weigh? The folks who know the answers (or think they do) are just waiting for you to ask on Usenet. Usenet (or "News") is a forum consisting of over 8,000 discussion topics called newsgroups. Usually anyone can write a note to a newsgroup (called 'posting an article' to the newsgroup), asking a question, answering a question, or just making a comment. And anyone can read any of the articles in a newsgroup. Depending on the group's popularity, your note might be read by 100,000 people or by no one. Usenet works a lot like a mailing list, the one used for this course, for example. We can mail a note to the list and it is automatically broadcast to all of us. This works well for small groups of people, but would be horrible if even 1% of 100,000 subscribers wrote a message every day to the list, all on slightly different topics. You would surely miss the one important message from your boss or your mother, spending all day deleting the others. So instead, News is a separate program from mail. You start up a news reader designed to allow you to browse through your favorite groups. You can easily skip over groups you're not interested in today, and then browse the titles of articles within a group to find the ones you might like to read. A good news reader will also organize the articles by 'threads', grouping the articles which are replies to previous articles together. Finally you can read the articles and write a reply if you wish. NEWSGROUP HIERARCHIES Since there are more than 8,000 different newsgroups, they are organized into hierarchies. Each newsgroup has a multi-part name, separated by periods, indicating its place in the hierarchy. Usually the name is descriptive of what the newsgroup is about. rec.backcountry is about recreation in the backcountry. comp.os.linux.announce contains announcements about the Linux computer operating system. A newsgroup's name goes from the most general category on the left to more specific on the right. There are many different recreation groups (often indicated as rec.*) and even several different comp.os.linux.* groups (such as admin, development, help, and misc). Officially, there are seven major categories of newsgoups. The top level of the hierarchy is: comp Computer related topics. Hardware and Software news Usenet network and software topics. Includes the groups news.newusers.questions and news.announce.newusers rec Recreation, hobbies, the arts sci Science and engineering, including social science soc Social issues, from politics to socializing talk Debate on controversial topics misc Groups include jobs, forsale, invest, consumers, legal, etc. Unofficially, there are many more top level categories that your internet provider may carry. Some of these are: alt Alternative groups, impossible to characterize, some mainstream, some just wacko. de Groups about, and usually in, German (Deutsch). Also see fr (France), fj (japan), uk (United Kingdom), ca (Canada), etc. austin Groups about Austin, TX. Also see ny, nyc, nj, etc. bit Mirrors many popular bitnet mailing lists, various topics biz Business, includes commercial announcements and ads k12 Topics on educational issues clari Clarinet news service on many different topics and locales NEWS ETIQUETTE You can't get into too much trouble just reading news, but when you start posting articles, there are standards of etiquette you should observe, most of which are common-sensical rules of courtesy. There are no official rules to posting articles, though if you irritate enough people and they complain to your system administrator, you could have your account removed. In general, read a group for a while before you post to it. Then try to emulate those contributors you have come to admire. Read the FAQ: Many newsgroups have documents answering Frequently Asked Questions which provide a good introduction to the group and its topic. You can often get an excellent introduction and orientation to the subject, and reassure yourself that your question is not stupid if you RTFAQ first. See below for how to get a newsgroup's FAQ. Flames: People forget there is a person on the other end of the conversation (probably because of lack of visual cues) and write horrendous things they would never say face to face. Don't do this. Personal attacks are never productive. If you feel strongly, say so, but people are seldom interested in how you simply feel. Give your reasons. If you're really incensed, wait a while before you write a reply. Titles: Articles have titles, just like email. Choose yours judiciously. Others will be scanning the list of titles to see if the article is interesting. Use informative keywords to convey the topic of the article as succinctly as possible. Quoting: It's a very good idea to quote relevant parts of an article you are replying to, since no one will remember what the previous article said. However, quote only enough to convey the point you are responding to. It's extremely irritating to page through long quotes only to see nothing but "I agree" or "Right on" or "Go back to Russia" or something similarly witty at the end. @Advertising: You might want to comment that most forms of advertising @outside of the biz.* hierarchy can get you in serious trouble. The @time-honored game of "Usenet Whacka Mole" has been seriously getting @out of hand since Canter and Siegel came into town. Cross-posting: You can usually post to several groups simultaneously, but do this carefully, especially in replies to articles that have been posted across many groups. Edit the header to post only to those groups that would be truly interested in your response. SUBSCRIBING TO GROUPS; REQUESTING NEW GROUPS Each user has a file (whose name varies depending on the newsreader) containing the groups that the user is "subscribed" to, and the articles within each group that have already been read. You're not stuck with your initial list of groups since newsreaders have commands that allow you to add or subscribe to additional groups. (In trn, use "a" while viewing the group list.) If your internet provider carries that group, it will be added to your list and you can read the articles that your provider has saved (usually from a week to a month old). If your provider does not carry a group you've heard about and would like to read, just ask them to. Many sites have their own newsgroup called .general (or announce or misc). Site specific questions are asked and answered here. Failing that, send email to "support", "sysadmin" or "help" with your request. FURTHER READING There are several important sources for additional information: news.announce.newusers This is a moderated group (someone has to approve all submissions) with articles on history, etiquette, starting a group, etc. Everyone should start here. Read at least Emily_Postnews. FAQs for a group Many groups have collections of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) usually posted to the group twice a month. They are also ftp'able from rtfm.mit.edu in /pub/usenet-by-group/ in a directory of the same name as the group List of all groups A file containing a list of newsgroups is available by ftp from rtfm.mit.edu in /pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/news/lists/ as files List_of_Active_Newsgroups,_Part_I (and II).