How do Newsgroups work and how can I get started?

Question

Please only answer if you know what newsgroups are. Full points and many thanks for detailed answers please, including links forums, download clients, step by step ect.

Answer 1

newsgroups have been around a long long long time

originally started as a text based message posting system divided by group hierarchies, it wasn't long before someone figured out by using standard ASCII code you could encode jpg's into ASCII and then have then decoded one the post was retrieved with 3rd party software, that eventually lead to MIME encode / decoding and then it evolved as they figured out how to post mp3s, movies etc..



now with advent of par files ( to ensure a post extracts even if all the files are not present ), yenc encoding ( to make the posts smaller ) and automatic extracting software ( Grabit ver 1.7 beta ) grabbing what not from Usenet ( newsgroups ) is easier than ever.



there are private newsgroups servers ( like Giganews Supernews, or my favorite Shemes.com ) which sell download by the gigabytes for monthly or one time useage fees and there is your own ISP new-servers.



some ISP such as SBC and AT&T have dropped newsgroups alltogether.



the subject is far to complex for me to explain,

you best off going to shemes.com and download grabit



and google newsgroups faq to see what newsgroups is and how to "susbscribe" to it

Answer 2

Newsgroups are (generally) a network of discussion forums (for lack of a better term) called USENET that has been around since 1979, well before the Web. Traditionally you would connect, using a newsreader, to a USENET server, which was usually a server run by your ISP (or work or college or whatever). That server would periodically connect to other USENET servers and send and receive messages for each newsgroup it subscribed to.



Nowadays it is a lot more simple, you can just go to Google Groups, which has an archive of USENET messages going as far back as 1981.



With the advent and proliferation of individual web-based discussion forums, USENET has lost its status as the preeminent discussion forum for online discussion and research, but it still exists, and many ISPs still operate news servers.



Technically there were numerous newsgroups that weren't part of USENET, but worked in parallel to it; news servers would just have to connect to different servers for those groups.

Answer 3

How Do Newsgroups Work