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Newsgroups are online communities for discussing various topics, with roots in academic settings in the 1970s. To access a newsgroup, a newsreader is needed, and newsgroups are organized by main topics and subcategories. Archives of old discussions are often available and can be useful for research or historical interest.
A newsgroup is an Internet community dedicated to discussing a particular topic of interest. Contrary to “news” in the name, newsgroups are rarely about current events and cover everything from debates about the origins of humanity to tips on how to trim a cat’s toenails. Newsgroups can be an extremely useful resource for information and community dialogue, and people of all ages take advantage of the services these communities offer.
The development of newsgroups predates the Internet, with newsgroups appearing in the 1970s in academic settings. People in universities and colleges wanted to communicate, but didn’t have the facilities available to the military, so they developed usenet (short for “user network”), a mesh network of servers and individual computers. People communicated on the usenet by posting to newsgroups or by reading content in newsgroups of interest.
To access a newgroup, someone must obtain a newsreader, a program that can communicate with the usenet. Some browsers have built-in newsreaders, and many operating systems also come with a default newsreader. Next, someone has to subscribe to a newsgroup. Public newsgroup listings are readily available, and people can also be privately invited to join a group. Newsgroup numbers are pretty dizzying and it helps to get advice from friends to navigate the system.
Newsgroups are organized in the form of main topics, which are divided into subcategories. The location of a newsgroup is given in the form of a subject and its subcategories, separated by periods, like this: example.subcategory.lessersubcategory. As of 2009, the subjects were: Science, Society, Speech, Humanities, Computers, Miscellaneous, News, Leisure, and Alternative. Many of these are abbreviated, with science written as sci., society as soc., computer as comp., misc. as misc., recreation as rec. and alternative as alt. When talking about an entire topic, people usually add a wildcard after the abbreviation, as in misc.*. The largest topic, by far, is alt.*, which covers a huge assortment of topics. To create a newsgroup, people generally need to reach a consensus on the need for a new group and get approval. Otherwise, the new group might be deleted. The exception to this rule is the alt.* category, where people are free to create new topics.
Many newsgroups have huge archives that are stored on the server. These archives can be an excellent resource, as they can go back decades and contain all kinds of interesting material. Some of these archives have been extracted and converted to HTML format so that people can read them in a normal web browser; this is common with resources that people commonly request, or resources that users think will be beneficial to the general public. Exploring a newsgroup archive can also be of interest purely for historical interest, to see how ideas have evolved and changed over the course of the newsgroup’s existence.
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