There is no central authority that oversees the tens of thousands of Usenet sites and millions of participants. Conventions have grown up, such as not repeatedly sending offensive messages to a newsgroup, and you are expected to learn and follow them, but there is no net police force; Usenet is run by the people who use it. Interestingly, when there are no rules, most people choose to cooperate.
Usenet is free to those with Internet access. It was conceived as a computerized version of a bulletin board for notices and news items, but is now used primarily for discussion groups.
The Geometry Forum has created and administers eight newsgroups:
Articles are stored and managed by a news server, which is accessed using a newsreader. NewsWatcher is the Macintosh newsreader used at Swarthmore College and for Forum workshops. At Swarthmore, the full complement of newsgroups is administered by the Computing Center; its address (used in configuring NewsWatcher), is news.swarthmore.edu. For Forum groups, the server address is mathforum.org.
As you read articles, you can progress from one to another, save an article to a file, mail a reply to a person who posted an article, or compose a followup article of your own. An individual submission of an article to a newsgroup is called a posting.
When moving from one to the other you must quit NewsWatcher (choose Quit from the File menu or type Command-Q) and launch NewsWatcher from the other folder by double-clicking on either news or geonews.
The first time you open NewsWatcher you may have a bit of a wait while it builds the full group list. Thereafter you will see status messages while it checks for new groups and then new articles.
If you have not been furnished with small group lists (we have given you news and geonews; these are the files to use to launch NewsWatcher) you will want to build your own by subscribing to groups that interest you. (More later about building your own lists.)
To read a newsgroup, double-click on its name. A window will open showing the author and subject of each article.
To the left of the author will be either ‚, indicating a single article, or a triangle with a number next to it. These triangles show threads: replies to postings that keep the same subject line preceded by Re:
The number shows how many articles there are in the thread. If you aren't seeing all the articles, click on the triangle to expand the thread.
Following a thread (reading articles that reply to other articles) can be a good way to get a feel for a newsgroup.
You will only see a short version of the header in NewsWatcher; a full header contains such information as the time and date the article was posted, where followup articles will be sent, the person who sent it, the size of the body+signature, the newsgroups to which it was posted, the name of the Internet host that posted it, the organization of the person who posted, the route the article took (its path) to get to you, the address to which to send personal replies, the address of the computer from which the article was sent, the subject, and more.
The body is the main part of the article, which you type in before posting. The signature consists of a few lines at the end that are automatically added to every article you post, but signatures are optional and you must create them. Select Preferences from the File menu and, under Topics, choose Signature from the pull-down menu. Type what you would like added to your postings (name/nickname, e-mail address, snail mail address, etc.) and click OK.
When you have read an article, you may choose from the following options in the News menu:
From the News menu you can also
When you create a followup article it's good practice to delete as much of the original as you can--just keep the lines you're responding to.
All the newsgroups your institution maintains will appear in the Full Group List window. To move a group to your own personal window, highlight it and either drag it across with the mouse or choose Subscribe from the Special menu. When you have selected all the newsgroups you think you would like to follow, save the Untitled window and give it a name (e.g., Sarah's Newsgroups). The next time you launch NewsWatcher, do so by double-clicking on this file you have created, which contains only the newsgroups you would like to read.
In person, you can sometimes jokingly insult someone and get away with it because your body language says, "Just kidding." There's no body language on the Internet, however, and since Usenet articles are read all over the world by people from many different cultures, joking insults can be a really bad idea. We need some way to show we don't mean to be rude.
Here's the basic smiley: :-) Turn your head to the left and notice the eyes, nose, and mouth. Putting this smiley at the end of a sentence is like saying "just kidding."
Smileys turn up a lot in e-mail as well as in news. Here are some more smileys:
Often, if a response to a question is of general interest, it's a good idea to post it to the whole group. If the answer is of limited interest, however, or the questioner has asked that responses be sent directly to an e-mail address, don't post to the world--e-mail.
A FAQ list is a document maintained by a volunteer that lists and answers all the frequently asked questions for a newsgroup. These documents may be posted to the group periodically--every week, two weeks, or month. You can also find them in the group news.answers, which consists of FAQ lists and related material.
If you can't find an FAQ any other way, you could try posting to the newsgroup and asking that someone mail you a copy or tell you how to get it.