General Information About Newsgroup
A newsgroup is a place to post messages in a bulletin board
fashion and is a collection of e-mails. Different newsgroups are
housed on one news server.
Basically a newsgroup is a collection of e-mails if you would
like to think of it that way. The newsgroups are organized in
a hierarchal system based on subject matter. An example would
be:
sci.astronomy
The sci portion of the name signifies the general
topic of the newsgroup and the astronomy part
represents the primary topic of the newsgroup.
A thread can be thought of as a discussion. In essence, it is
a series of replies to a message that was posted to the
newsgroup.
Newsgroups have many useful functions. One such function is
the discussion of topics pertaining to your interests. A
newsgroup is also a place where answers can be found to
questions you post. You can also usually find information
in advance in your field of interest since many of the people
who post to these groups are experts in their field (or
there are those who think they are). Another use of newsgroup
is for announcement purposes. Then there is always the
ultimate use of a bulletin board system: sales. Some
newsgroups' posters will post items for sale. This is
sometimes called "spam".
The University of Maryland (UM) offers several different news
servers and thousands of newsgroups within them. Some of
these newsgroups are UM specific and are denoted
by um. Others are Departmental Newsgroups such as
cs, denoting computer science. Important newsgroups
to watch are the announcement newsgroups that post network
outages and news. The main news servers supported by the
university are:
-
news.umd.edu
-
news.wam.umd.edu
-
news.glue.umd.edu
In order to read newsgroups, you will need a newsreader. Some
example of newsreaders are SeaMonkey, Outlook Express,
and tin. Information regarding these applications can be
found in Reading Newsgroups with a
Graphical Client.
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