RIVER BENDER - April 2002

At a recent meeting of the New Bern Computer Users Group I was surprised to learn how few members used Internet Newsgroups and suggested that it might be a good topic for a future meeting. In this article I'd like to briefly discuss what Newsgroups are and suggest a simple way to access them compared to using MS Outlook Express or a news reader.

Newsgroups, called USENET for 'Users Network', were created by Duke University faculty members in the early days of Internet. This was before the public had access and when it was called ARPAnet. Newsgroups were actually a distributed bulletin board where messages could be posted and replied to on various subjects. I recall when the Internet became public there were about 16,000 newsgroup categories. A few years later I heard 30,000 and now I'm hearing over 50,000. In foreign languages there may be far more.

To some people Newsgroups have a bad reputation. This is because they've heard of or browsed through the myriad of pornographic text and graphic categories that usually start with the subject heading of "Alt.binaries." Some Internet service providers don't even subscribe to these but most do since censorship is frowned upon on the Internet. One provider, however, was recently fined by the Attorney General in New York for allowing clients access to child pornography sites. In the legislative area pornography and spam on the Internet is where most concern is currently taking place. But since pornography is only a small portion of Newsgroups one would be remiss not to use them because of it.

The usual way to access Newsgroups is through MS Outlook Express. To set up Outlook one must go to Tools/Accounts/Add/News and enter an e-mail address and a News (NTTP) Server address. The latter is obtained by calling your server. For CoastalNet it is news2.coastalnet.com.

A simpler way to access Newsgroups is to use http://www.google.com. This is perhaps the most popular search engine on Internet and I suggest that you have a shortcut icon on your desktop for it. To create one when the Google web page is displayed go to File/Send/ and select Shortcut to Desktop.

In February 2001, Google acquired the Usenet discussion service from Deja.com, including its entire archive of more than 500 million messages. Some of you, like me, probably used Deja.com earlier to look up information.

To access Newsgroups using the Google search engine open it and click on Groups. This will confine your search to Newsgroups rather than the web. Suppose, for example, you wanted to find information on termites. If you simply typed "termites" you'd find 34,000 messages. But if you typed "Do I have termites?" in quotes you'll see 48 messages asking the same general question, including answers people have posted called a thread. Try different combinations of search words and be patient because the answer to practically all questions is out there somewhere.

To post your own question, you must first identify the newsgroup category most appropriate to your question. You don't want to ask about termites in a computer category or you'll get lots of flak. As a matter of fact that's how spamming got started. It originally meant cross posting of messages in unrelated Newsgroups. A problem with posting messages is that it's a great place for spammers to harvest your e-mail address. To avoid this you can fool software robots by adding something like "nospam" to your address, such as cn1027nospam@coastalnet.com. The robot then picks up an invalid address while a person replying to you knows to remove the nospam characters.

There's much to learn searching Newsgroups using the Google search engine. I recommend that everyone read the Help information and browse through the Newsgroup categories. Only after repeated use of Google will one become proficient in finding desired information.