Usenet

hey guys and gals

what the **** is that Usenet thing, everybody keeps talking about it, I don't know how to reach it, I checked the website usenet.com but it seemed like an ordinary pictures, music and movies website, I also want to subscribe to the alt.2600 group, could somebody plz help in this regard...


Thanks very much


Xenia

Well, think of usenet as a huge collection of message boards, in several servers, which use the Network News Trasfer Protocol, ie, it's not a webpage. A quick start would be:
Visit this page here, and check links:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/U/USENET.html
Now that you have the definition, you could try a newsreader, which you can find embedded in your mail client, like outlook or as part of opera, mozilla etc.. You can also download a dedicated news client, like tin for example.
If you want to give it a try with IE (it will call the news client) type:
news://news.savvy.net
and have fun. This is just an example, there are several other servers.

Of course most ISPs allow you to use news groups. If ud wish to find out if ur ISP supports access to usenet either check their main website (which is usually no help) or try finding the news server for urself.

Most news servers are in this format

nntp.ISP.com
news1.ISP.com
news.ISP.com
news-server.ISP.com
nntp1.ISP.com
netnews.ISP.com

ect ect ect

Of course ull need a client to view the nntps. I personally use Free Agent which you can easly google up if u cared enough to.


BE WARNED, many news servers contain some things that will be VERY offensive to many...

news servers are well known for the spread of child porn and virii. Just be careful and look up a list of extensions to files that could be harmfull for ur computer such as BAT EXE SCR COM ect ect

good luck and have fun : ) theres a lot to learn and USENET is the best place to learn it.

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