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technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 What are 'Newsgroups' and why should you care?March 7, 2001 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, The Syracuse Newspapers You know about e-mail and you know about the Web. But what are these things called newsgroups? Reader Dave Goldstein asked that question in a letter I received recently. "Sometimes I am asked if I wish to subscribe to a newsgroup," he wrote. "Is that something that will only get me unwanted e-mail? When would this be of value? And what does 'subscribe to' mean? This is another term that pops up sometimes when I am on the Internet." Newsgroups are almost as old as the Internet itself. Their heritage goes back to the Usenet, a network that was separate from the rest of the Internet for years. They're message areas where people can write back and forth and post their notes for everyone to see. There are more than 30,000 separate newsgroups. The exact number is never known because no one is in charge of all of them. Many newsgroups do have "moderators" who help keep discussions on target, but thousands do not. You read the messages on a newsgroup using a news reader (sometimes spelled "newsreader"). It can be a special program just for this function or the newsreader might be built into your e-mail software. For Windows, two of the best separate newsreaders are Free Agent (a free program) and Agent (the non-free version of Free Agent, with more features). You can find them at http://www.forteinc.com/. Both Outlook Express, the ubiquitous e-mail program that comes with Windows, and Netscape Messenger, from a rival company, handle newsreading effortlessly, so you don't need to download and install a separate program if you already use Outlook Express or Netscape Messenger. Despite their generic name, which seems to indicate that newsreaders are designed for reading messages only, all newsreaders let you post messages as well as read them. In this way, they work just like e-mail programs. You "subscribe" to a newsgroup by clicking a menu in your newsreader. This simply means the newsreader will keep track of new messages for you. You never have to subscribe in order to read messages. Subscribing just makes reading them easier. There is no "subscription fee" as there is when you subscribe to a magazine. Many people love newsgroups as a way to keep up with topics they're interested in. As a fan of bicycling in general and recumbent biking in particular, I read a couple of biking newsgroups almost daily. I get my "fix" by keeping current on what others are saying. It's all very satisfying. But newsgroups have another function. Messages in newsgroups might not be messages at all. They could be photos or MP3 music files or anything else. Smart newsreaders know how to handle these file attachments, but old programs don't. If your newsreader can't decipher the so-called binary attachments in newsgroups, ditch it and get a more modern one. I'm also compelled by my conscience to warn you that some of the newsgroups that have such file attachments contain pornography, and others, such as ones that have thousands of MP3 files, contain unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. If either of these categories offends you, be careful when looking into the so-called "alt" newsgroups, where there are hundreds upon hundreds of message areas that deal with such stuff. |