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What are newsgroups?

Newsgroups (also known as Usenet) are one of the oldest uses of the internet. They have been around for much longer than the web. A newsgroup is very similar to an email account, with one important difference: everyone in the world can access it.

When you post a message to a newsgroup, the message goes to your local news server, and this server sends copies of the message to all servers it knows about. The message slowly propagates through the net, until all the news servers in the world have a copy.

In contrast, some websites have "message boards", which may look like newsgroups. They serve the same basic purpose, but do not work as well. Message boards have become more popular than newsgroups, simply because they are easier to find. To use a message board, you just click on a link from the main site. To use a newsgroup, you must start up a newsreader, which is a separate program from the web browser.

Here are the major differences between newsgroups and message boards:

Flexibility - You can connect to a newsgroup with any newsreader program. If you do not like the features of one program, it is fairly easy to switch to another. On a message board, the features are determined by the site hosting the board. You have no choice.

Speed - When you connect to a newsgroup, your newsreader downloads all of the new messages automatically. This allows you to quickly flip through several hundred messages, reading only the items that interest you and skipping others. On a message board, every time you display a new message, your web browser must connect to the board, and download the message individually. This usually means a 2-10 second pause between each message you read. It may not sound like much, but if you subscribe to a busy group, reading 100 messages could take over an hour!

Community - Many newsgroups are used by older, more experienced people. The community of users is more stable than the users of a message board. (However, there are still many jerks in both types of systems.)

Robustness - If a news server breaks, the rest of the world can continue to use the newsgroup through other news servers. Since web message boards are stored on a single server, any time this server has a problem, the entire board is shut down.

To confuse things a bit, some companies have created connections between their website and a news server, so you can browse newsgroups on the web. These systems suffer from the same speed and flexibility problems as web message boards, but they do allow you to access the wealth of information on Usenet. 

By the way, web-based email systems, such as Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, suffer many of the same problems as web-based message boards. The web was designed for simple displaying of documents, not the interactive document management that is necessary for email or group discussion.

How to use newsgroups