Tutorial

What are News-Groups

The newsgroups are public areas of debate, they can be imagined as many different notice boards where anyone may put his message or advice (generally called post) or answer to those of other people, it is thus possible to start a public discussion. At the moment they are tens of thousands, dedicated to all sort of subjects.

How does this work in practice? There are apposite software said "newsreaders" that can download  the list of the available newsgroups on a certain news-server, to pick up and let you read the messages (posts) of the newsgroups you are interested in and to send yours. Every message you send will be visible by all the people "following" the newsgroup to which you sent the message. To "follow" a newsgroup simply means to download its messages quite regularly.

If the web is similar to a place, the newsgroups are more similar to a community where everyone is free to debate and contribute as he wants and can. As in all communities there are behaviour rules and some simple precautions against some  problems you may meet. We'll see it later.

News groups names

Every newsgroup has its own name, intended to let understand approximately the subject debated in it. These names have a standard structure: shortenings or acronyms divided by a point; reading them in succession they go on specificating more and more the subject of the newsgroup. Sounds difficult? No, look here:

rec.travel.europe

It'the name of the newsgroups that deals with everything about travel in Europe. From left to right: rec means recreation and is the abbreviation you find at the beginning of the name of all the newsgroups about recreational activities, as rec.bicycle, rec.windsurfing and many more among which, of course, rec.travel, and so on... (so that it would be possible to have "rec.travel.europe.eastern", though it doesn't exist, to discuss travelling in Eastern Europe).

Standard groups (and not)

Because of historical reasons connected with the origins of USENET  8 categories asserted themselves nearly as a standard and all the news-servers should accept them to be in USENET (though by now not all of them accept all the under-categories). As they were started, at the very beginning of INTERNET, in the U.S.A., these groups are all in English.
Here is the list:

These are Usenet "historical" categories, but as there are not universal rules to create new groups and hyerarchies, soon "alternative" hyerarchies were born, the most famous and varied is surely

Beside these above there are surely many other first level groups, from the "regional" ones to the ones of private enterprises (Microsoft, for instance)or even some that single providers host only on their server. As you'll have understood the more interesting for us are the regional ones. They usually repeat the structure of most famous ones preceeding the name with the abbreviation of the nation: fr for France, aus for Australia, it for Italy and so on. There may however be some variations: fr.rec.voyages instead of fr.rec.travel, Italy has it.hobby.viaggi. Of course it's not sure that every nation has its newsgroups, neither that every state has the very one you are interested in.
It's equally clear that most of the posts are in the language of the country of the group. This doesn't mean that you cannot do some post in English, but don't be so sure everybody will understand you!

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