A Brief Introduction to Usenet Newsgroups
This page is a very brief introduction to Usenet newsgroups - but
the links below have more extensive information.
Usenet newsgroups have been around longer than the World Wide Web, but most
people (from my observation) know practically nothing about them. In the news,
you can find just about anything you're looking for - if you know where to look
and have the right software.
The first thing you have to do is get access to a news server. Most ISP's have
a news server as part of the setup they supply, but they really don't advertise
it. Ask your ISP for the hostname of their news server. Quite often it's
similar to "news.yourISP.com" but it could be
just about anything.
If your ISP doesn't have a news server, there are lots of public access ones,
but you'll probably have to pay a subscription fee. Use your favorite search
engine to look for "public access news
servers" or something similar.
Once you have the address of a news server to use, you need software to access
the newsgroups. While your Web browser undoubtably can access the newsgroups,
my experience is it's a clumsy way to do it: Web browsers just aren't set up
for exploring newsgroups, they're built for exploring the Web. You're better
off using software built for the task.
My favorite newsreader is
WinVN used with yProxy from
Brawny Lads Software. You have to watch out for spaces in filenames when
saving files from the newsgroups, but the program is pretty straight-forward
and includes a decent online manual. You need yProxy to handle the new "yEnc"
encoding scheme that's designed to reduce the amount of traffic on the
Internet, but the directions are so simple you won't even know it's there.
For more information, try these links:
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