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Having a newsgroup to discuss nets is different than discussing mail. Mark |
There are thousands of newsgroups, so your challenge is finding those that are most interesting to you. There are several ways to search for newsgroups on various topics:
- News readers. The most direct way to find newsgroups is search your news reader’s full newsgroup listings for various keywords of interest to you. Note that many newsgroups are named after contractions, acronyms, and abbreviations, so try searching for those forms first. Also try searching for abbreviated keywords — for example “garden” since it will find both “gardens” and “gardening”, and search for “manag” since it will find both “managing” and “management”.
- Web listings. If you are looking for an established group, you can search one of the newsgroups listings below. Remember that not all newsgroups are carried by every news server, so if you find a group you will still need to search your own server to confirm that it is accessible to you.
- Net search. You can find references to newsgroups on the web by searching for a keyword and the word “newsgroup”, for example gardening AND newsgroup.
- New groups. Most news readers are designed to minimize Internet network traffic, and therefore don’t reload the newsgroups list every time you start the application. However, dozens of newsgroups are added to the Usenet every day. Your news reader probably has a “new groups” menu item to request a new groups list from your server. If it doesn’t have the feature, you can often accomplish the same thing by reloading the entire news groups list over again. New newsgroups can also be found by reading the message with the subject “New Usenet Groups” in the group news.announce.newgroups.