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Newsgroups
Newsgroups are places on the Internet where people exchange ideas and opinions,post public notices or have an argument! They are sometimes called forums, BBS’s, digests or mailing lists.
Readers post messages or questions or articles to newsgroups for other people to read. Other readers may view the messages and post replies if they wish. They can seem a bit chaotic at first because there are no official rules or controllers but you can find some really interesting information there. Topics are seemingly unlimited and range from business to computers to education to recreation to music to games to sports to science to social and cultural topics to up to the minute news of the day.
Some newsgroups are moderated, others are unmoderated. Moderated means there's some control over what postings are allowed. For example, business advertisements may not be allowed. Unmoderated newsgroups will occasionally have very irrelevant messages in them.
The best way to view or participate in Newsgroups is by using a newsreader , or to see what newsgroups exist go to http://www.deja.com and click on Discussions. Newsgroups are listed under various names such as alt, rec, soc, sci, news, biz, K12, talk, and Regional. Deja explains what these abbreviations mean and there is a search facility there for you to use.
In Outlook Express (or whatever news-reader program you have) there is a place in the Tools menu where you can select Newsgroups. You can display the newsgroups supported by your ISP. There are about 30,000 newsgroups - your ISP won't list all of them. If you aren't set up to view newsgroups you should ask your ISP how to do the necessary entry in your newsreader program setup.
Mailing Lists are a little like newsgroups - but unlike newsgroups which require you to actively look them up and check the messages, mailing lists drop the messages right into your own mailbox. If you would like to have more messages coming in when your clear your email, sign up for a few mailing lists!
If you think this excerpt was helpful and informative
check out Secrets of Taming Computers
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