[TheForge] OT: Accessing newsgroups, WAS [Re: Plasma cutter comparison]

[Andy Vida]

Chris Caswell wrote:
> 
> How does one go about joining a newsgroup?

First, you need a newsreader.  There are many available.  Netscape,
Mozilla, Opera etc. all provide newsreading capability.  There are
also older, ASCII-based readers such as rn and trn.  These are
excellent newsreaders is you are not looking for fancy graphics.
They run quickly and reliably... far better than the fancy crap,
but they fail when you want pictures... you know, your kiddie porn
and stuff like that. 8^o

BTW, Netscrape etc. have their newsreaders built in.

In order to use the reader you have to know the name of your ISP's
news server.  It's often something like "news.mysispname.com" For
example, mine is "news.netlabs.net".

Once you know that (ask your ISP if you don't know it), you have
to tell the reader what the server is.  This is usally done in the
options section of the reader.

Once you've ID'd the server, you can then subscribe to newsgroups.
In programs such as netscrape, somewhere there is a "subscribe to
newsgroups" menu item.  Find it and click on it.  Often it will
show a list of possible news servers (if you've entered only one,
it should show only one, but some readers add a default server
called "secure".  This is so you can download your kiddie porn
using TLS/SSL type encryption so nobody <cough> CIA <cough> can
see what you're up to.  Ignore that one, it basically never works.

Anyhow, choose the server, and the reader will then attempt to down
load the list of newsgroups from your server.  This will take some
time because there could be as many as 100K newsgroups.  Be patient.
When it is done, you should be able to search for goups by strings.
E.g., if you want to find all groups with the word "children" in it,
you would enter that string into the appropriate field and execute
the search, which might return entries such as"

	alt.sex.children
	rec.beat.my.children.silly
	nj.children.for.sale.see.bruce.freeman

And so on.  You then will see some means of subscribing to them.
Subscribe and then usually the names will appear in a folder-like
structure on the reader screen.  You click the group you wish to 
read, the reader will D/L the article headers so you can see what's
being discussed, and you choose an article that is of interest to 
you, click on it, the reader D/Ls it ane you can read away and
reply to it if you are so moved.

The ASCII based readers are different in that you meed to learn the
commands for subscribing, navigating, reading, and replying to posts.
It is not a difficult thing to do, and if you have telnet access to
a UNIX host, I would strongly recommend trn as a fine reader.  "trn"
stands for "threaded rn", and improvement over the original rn
program, which is also very good.

Phew... I hope this is helpful
	

--
	-Andy V.

	We are the dust of Gods, the gloves of Devils and demons. 

						-A.V