Newsgroups

What are Newsgroups?

Usenet News is a group of discussion groups, called newsgroups. Newsgroups can be used for business or pleasure and there are newsgroups of thousands of topics. Usenet news is similar to mailing lists, anyone who has access to a group can read and/or post to the discussion, however, it does not clutter up your mailbox since you do not receive news as mail. You may want to use newsgroups to get information about a specific topic, a project topic for example.

You can use newsgroups to:

Find people with varying views on curriculum-related subjects;

Find people who are experts on curriculum-related subjects;

Advertise for collaboration on NET projects or join other's project requests;

Connect with teachers with varying interests;

Stay up to date on conferences, new projects, software, contests, and grants;

Access large collections of freeware and shareware.

Newsgroup Naming Conventions

Newsgroup names look a lot like host addresses, words or abbreviations separated by periods. The following list shows some of the top-level (first name) newsgroups:

Group	Topic
alt	Alternative subjects, often inappropriate
bionet	Biology subjects
bit	Bitnet network
biz	Business subjects
clari	Clarinet, a subscription service that brings information from the UPI
comp	Computer-related topics
news	Information about newsgroups
rec	Recreational topics
sci	Science topics
soc	Social issues
talk	Debates
misc	Everything else not appropriate to other listed categories

How to Subscribe to a Newsgroup Using Pine

You may read news using Pine Mail Utility. When you launch pine, select L for folders in the Main Menu. Then select News-collection <UAH News>, press enter to expand the list. Scroll through the list of newsgroups, when you find the newsgroup you want to join, press A to subscribe (see the menu at the bottom of the screen). You might also choose News.announce.newusers which is created for new users. If you do not see al isting of newsgroups (there are a LOT), type A (for subscribe), following the menu at the bottom of the screen, type Ctrl-T (^T) to get a list of newsgroups, then choose the one you desire, and choose A again to subscribe.

How to Read News Using Pine

To read your accumulated messages in your chosen newsgroup, launch pine and choose L for folders. Choose News and a list your selected newsgroups will appear. Highlight and press enter to read the current news messages.

Posting to a Newsgroup

Sending a message to a newsgroup is called posting to the newsgroup. To do so, highlight the newsgroup you want to post to in your newsgroup list (in Pine) and type C for compose. Pine will ask if you want to post to the current newsgroup. If you type Y for yes, Pine will open a mail buffer for your mail message. Then you simply type and send the message the same way you do an email message.

Unsubscribing from a Newsgroup

The easiest way to unsubscribe from a Newsgroup is to highlight it in Pine and choose Unsubscribe from the menu at the bottom of the screen.