Using Personal Computers

Section 4: The Internet

Part 5: Newsgroups

In part one of this section of the course, we stated that there were three major services on the Internet: the World Wide Web, E-mail, and Newsgroups. We have looked in detail at the third two, but so far we have not covered newsgroups. So what are they?

We will only look briefly at them here, as they are of less interest to the average Internet user than the Web or E-mail. Put simply, a newsgroup is like an electronic notice board. Anyone can put a message on it, and anyone can read it. There are many thousands of newsgroups covering many different subjects. Some common examples of their use are:

• To carry on public discussions on topics of shared interest
• To ask for help or advice on a particular subject
• To advertise - rather like classified ads
• To distribute files - like E-mail, you can put any type of file on a bulletin board, not just text files

To access a newsgroup, you need a news reader program. Common examples include:

• Microsoft Internet Mail, which comes with Internet Explorer 3
• Microsoft Outlook Express, which comes with Internet Explorer 4 (this is a combined E-mail and news reader program)
• The Newsgroup component of Netscape Communicator

There are several others, some of which are more advanced than the above ones, but these are probably the most common these days.

To access newsgroups, the news reader must be configured the name of a news server. This is the name of a computer which holds the newsgroups. You cannot use just any news server - it must be one that you have the right to access. Generally your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will have one or more news servers, and these are the servers that you are entitled to access. You can usually find out the name of the news server from the ISP's web sight or by phoning them up.

Note that not all newsgroups appear on all news servers, so you may find that one person with one ISP can access a newsgroup which you cannot access. However, the more common ones will be carried by all the news servers.

Finally, a couple of warnings:

1. Some newsgroups are moderated - that is, somebody supervises the newsgroup and stops irrelevant items from being posted. However, many are not, so there's a lot of rubbish, including some offensive material, on many newsgroups.

2. When you configure your newsgroup program, it will ask for your e-mail address. Think twice before putting it in - spammers (i.e. people who send out spam, or electronic junk mail) often use programs which trawl through newsgroups looking for e-mail addresses. A common ploy is to modify your e-mail address in some way. For example, I might use a_bovett@nospam.csi.com. If you add a signature to your messages (most newsreaders allow you to do this - it's simply some text which is appended to each message you post), you can then include the advice to remove the "nospam" from your e-mail address. That way, people who really want to get in touch with you can, but spammers who use (dumb) programs to search for e-mail addresses will be fooled.

That's all the detail we are going to go into here. If you're interested, places to look for more information include books on the Internet, the online help in news reader programs, or articles on the Web.