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Usenet: Usenet Newsgroup
built 190 days ago
Usenet is an online bulletin board system that began at Duke University in 1979. Usenet users can post messages to newsgroups that can be read (and responded to) by anyone who has access to the system through a newsreader. Over the years, the number of newsgroups has grown into the thousands, hosted all over the world and covering every conceivable topic.
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Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It consists of a set of "newsgroups" with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. "Articles" or "messages" are "posted" to these newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software -- these articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks.
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Unfortunately, not all of the people posting to Usenet read the Netiquette or follow them. Every now and then you will find that some people enjoy lurking around in newsgroups and posting offensive material and/or rude replies17. It's usually a good idea to simply ignore these people - a task that can easily be automatically accomplished by your newsreader. Most (if not all) Linux-based newsreaders provide the capability of assigning different levels of importance to the different articles, depending on various criteria such as Author, Number of Lines, Subject etc. The act of deleting a certain persons articles so that you will not even see them is referred to as ``killfiling''18, while other actions (such as highlighting, sorting by importance, marking as read while still displaying the article etc.) are referred to as ``scoring''. Again Gnus, Pan and Slrn stand out among the other readers with respect to this capability.
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Molly Wood at AnchorDesk wrote a Eulogy for Usenet (Jan 27) on the news that AOL would no longer provide Usenet feeds. The electronic bulletin boards of Usenet newsgroups were where the action was in the 1990s, but spam, viruses, and noise took their toll while other forums on the Web and now community blogs became more popular. The newsgroups themselves probably won't die. Google Groups is building on them to compete with Yahoo's Groups. But the whole routine of file transfer and special newsreaders that was Usenet could fall away.
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Today, almost all Usenet traffic is carried over the Internet. The current format and transmission of Usenet articles is very similar to that of Internet email messages. However, Usenet articles are posted for general consumption; any Usenet user has access to all newsgroups, unlike email, which requires a list of known recipients.
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Usenet operates much like the Internet-at-large; there is no single governing body or owner with absolute control, but there are recognized systems and groups who keep the whole thing almost organized. Much of that organization is done via Usenet in the 'news' hierarchy; that is where lists of newsgroups are published, new groups created and announced and site administrators and other volunteers generally agree how things are going to run. Periodic postings to these groups are a large part of what keeps Usenet a cohesive system. Documents describing the systems for newsgroup creation, active groups, what is discussed in certain groups, who is responsible for certain actions and how to create groups are updated and posted on a regular basis. These documents form the 'official' view of Usenet only because they are widely propagated and followed.
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Usenet Newsgroup