Newsgroups

Newsgroups are worldwide public discussion forums, hosted on USENET. Users can post to newsgroups, respond to posts, and create new newsgroups. By the end of 1997, there were more than 50,000 newsgroups on a wide variety of topics, all distributed via USENET, and hundreds are added each month.

In terms of online discussion groups, newsgroups are different from “chat rooms” in that they are not “real-time” conversations; rather, they present delayed correspondence between users. Newsgroups also differ from mailing lists, another type of online forum. Newsgroups are free and indiscriminate, while membership to mailing lists requires subscription, which may involve an application process or even a small fee. Also, mailing lists distribute new articles (or messages) to each subscriber's private email address, whereas newsgroups function as public bulletin boards to which members go in order to read and post messages.

USENET newsgroups are organized hierarchically by subject. The first few letters of the newsgroup name indicate the major subject category, and sub-categories are represented by a subtopic name. Groups generally have multiple levels of subtopics, such as rec.games.video.nintendo. USENET has a number of “official” subject hierarchies: biz, comp, misc, news, [Page 347]rec, soc, sci, talk, and humanities. “Alternative” subject hierarchies include alt, national, and local.

When one starts a topic with a posting on a newsgroup and someone else replies, this initial post and the response constitute a “thread” on the topic. A thread may grow to involve dozens or even hundreds of users responding to the initial post, or to any posting that came after it. Users may also start threads of their own as offshoots of the original discussion.

Postings on newsgroups generally expire after a few days or a few weeks; expired messages are deleted from the newsgroups to make room for new ones. The “expiration time” differs from one server to another, and may also vary from one newsgroup to another. It is possible that when an article expires on one server, it is still visible on other servers. In 1995, Deja News (http://www.dejanews.com), a search engine, provided an interface to USENET to archive and index messages so they can be searched and sorted. In 2001, Google Inc. acquired the Usenet Discussion Service from Deja News, which included the entire USENET archive of more than 500 million messages.

The best way to learn about USENET newsgroups is by observing how other users use them. Therefore, after locating a group of interest, users should lurk in the group for a couple of weeks. Lurking means reading the posts in the group without posting any messages of one's own—being a silent reader/observer. Lurking helps new users to learn about the rules and conventions of a group. It is believed that only after gaining lurking experience can a user effectively participate in online conversations. For new users, posting without lurking first would likely generate negative responses from others.

Another way to learn about the functioning of a particular group is to study its list of Frequently Asked Questions—its FAQ. FAQs are usually lists of questions, with answers, that have been asked over and over again by new users. New users are advised to search for the FAQ of a group, and read them to minimize their likelihood of asking questions for which answers are already available. Posting a question for which answers already have been provided in FAQs can result in negative feedback from other users. However, posting is appropriate for questions that remain after reading the FAQs.

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