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Welcome to the News - A look at Newsgroups

Classroom

[ introduction ] [ configuring ]
[ subscribing to ] [ handy hints]

[ introduction ] [ configuring ]
[ subscribing to ] [ handy hints]

[ introduction ] [ configuring ]
[ subscribing to ] [ handy hints]

[ introduction ] [ configuring ]
[ subscribing to ] [ handy hints]

Welcome to the News - A look at Newsgroups

One of the coolest things about the Internet is that whatever it is you want to know about, it's a fair bet that someone, somewhere out there, knows about it already and would probably love to share their knowledge with you. Newsgroups are one of the best ways to find these kinds of people. With online chat or websites, you can come across one by one who you can share ideas and information. If you find the right newsgroup, it can be filled with hundreds of people interested in the same thing, whether that's youth work ideas in your home country, current affairs or your favourite TV show or band.

Newsgroups work as kinds of message boards, where anyone can post or read messages on a specific topic. There are l iterally tens of thousands of newsgroups out there, and as such you are bound to find things, which are of interest and use to you. The bonus of the newsgroup over the web as a whole is the fact that is so interactive. If you post a message to a newsgroup asking for information, you can probably get 10 responses in just a few hours.

If you want to dip your toe in the water before jumping right in, go to www.deja.com. This site allows you to read and post messages in newsgroups through your web browser, which is a nice way to get a taste of the possibilities out there for you. However, if you find several newsgroups you like the look of and would like to keep reading, the best thing to do is to configure some newsgroup reading software, as this allows you to read the newsgroup messages offline (saving your phone bill!).

You will probably have been given newsgroup-reading software by your ISP when you signed up. This can either be a separate package altogether (eg Free Agent) or part of your email software (eg Outlook Express).

Configuring Outlook for Newsgroup Access

Depending on how your ISP configured your startup software for you, you may already have a news account set up. So open Outlook and look in the long window on the left hand side to see if a news account is already set up. It should be labelled fairly obviously, and will have an icon of a piece of paper with a red pin in it. If you are already set up, skip down to the next section. If not, don't panic, configuring your account is really simple. Just do the following:

Go to the Tools menu and click Accounts.
Press the News tab, click Add and choose News

Follow the onscreen prompts for your name and email address (these will be displayed on any messages you post). Enter the name of your ISP's news server (if you don't know what that is from the documentation, a quick email to your ISP should get you that).

Then give your server a "Friendly Name". This is just for your reference; so don't worry hugely. Just call it something that will remind you it your ISPs newsfeed. Choose your connection type. If you have a modem attached to your PC then choose "I will establish my Internet connection manually". This means you will log into the Internet before you start reading newsgroups. Press Close.

That's it! Wasn't so hard at all was it? So now, onto the fun stuff! *Reading* some Newsgroups!
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Subscribing to and Reading Newsgroups

The first time you click on your newsgroup server in the left hand window of Outlook, you will be asked if you want to download a list of Newsgroups. Click Yes. This will download a list of all the newsgroups available on your server, so make sure you are actually connected to the Internet when you do this. The list might take some time to download, as there are more than 50,000 available newsgroups. Be patient and hang in there.

Once you have got the full list you can start looking through to see what newsgroups you'd like to look at. Click on the Newsgroups button and you will get a list of all the available groups. Type what you are searching for into the white box above the list of all the available newsgroups and see what comes up. For example, if you want newsgroups relating to issues about voluntary organisations you could type that it. Bear in mind that the search is done by full word, so you might get more groups if you just type "volunt" as this would cover "volunteer, voluntary, volunteering" etc.

When you find a newsgroup you like just press the Subscribe button - you can subscribe to as many groups as you'd like (or think you'll have time to read!). When you have subscribed to a newsgroup, you will see that it appears in the left hand Outlook window underneath your News server. To collect the latest messages on the server you can either highlight the news server and then press Synchronise Account (which will update the newest headers for every news group you are subscribed to) or synchronise each group individually.

When you synchronise a newsgroup you will be given a list of all the new subject headers in the newsgroup. If you are interested in the message you can click on the subject header whilst you are online and the whole message will be downloaded.

Alternatively, you can work off line and right click your mouse on the subjects of messages you are interested in and mark them for downloading the next time you go online.

If there is a + sign by any message this means that there have been replies to it. If you click on the + you will be able to see the replies (and download them if you want to).
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Okay, Enough Reading I want to Post

The interface for 'posting' (sending messages to a newsgroup) is actually very similar to sending email. When you are reading Newsgroups in Outlook you will see that instead of the Email icons (New Mail, Reply, Reply All) you will get icons which say Compose Message, Reply to Group and Reply to Author. So sending an actual message to a newsgroup is very easy.
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Handy Hints

Well that's all the basics you need to know about Newsgroups. One word of advice though:

* When you find a newsgroup which interests you, the best thing you can do is read the messages for a while, to get a feel for what is going on (this is called "lurking". Most newsgroups have a FAQ (frequently asked questions list) which is posted periodically to answer the basics, and you should read this too. Spending time getting to know what is going on means that when you do decide to start posting you can avoid (as much as possible) one of the downsides of newsgroups - flaming. Sometimes if messages are posted which other members of the newsgroup dislike for whatever reason (and it could be something as simple as asking a question already answered in a FAQ post) you will find that you get sent a rude and / or angry reply. This is called being flamed. It happens to everyone when they first start so don't worry about it too much, and don't let it put you off getting involved in discussions on newsgroups. Just be ar in mind that people will be a lot friendlier if, just as when you email, you keep your subject lines relevant, cut out unnecessary quoted text of previous messages, and don't SHOUT!

And now you're ready for the next tutorial! It's Good to Talk -- Online Chat