Lesson 8: Is Anybody Out There?

Newsgroups are not, as the name may initially suggest, a collection of journalistic news stories. Newsgroups are discussion groups dedicated to very specific topics -- a kind of specialized cybersoapbox for Internauts. There are newsgroups for every imaginable subject. If there isn't one that suits you, you could potentially create your own!

With the wide spectrum of newsgroups available, how can you differentiate between them? Fortunately, newsgroups have a very orderly, hierarchical naming system. Newsgroup names are arranged in levels, with each level name separated by a period. The first name is the top level. For example, rec. is the top level in rec.collecting.coins. There are many sublevels within the rec. level -- collecting. being one of them. Within the collecting. level are more sublevels of newsgroups. One such group below collecting. is called coins. The following are examples of some top-level groups:

How can you access the huge collection of messages posted in newsgroups? The messages are made available to users through Usenet, a worldwide conferencing system which different computer systems and networks connect to by means of the UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Program) and NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) protocols. Whew! Quite a mouth full.

As you can imagine, an astronomical amount of messages is posted on the thousands of newsgroups every day. These messages are typically stored on a news server for less than a week before the individual computing sites remove them to make room for new ones.

Usenet newsgroups can be read at thousands of sites around the world. Check with your Internet service provider to see if it has Usenet access. If it does, all you need to start browsing through newsgroup messages is one of the many freely available newsreader software programs! You probably have one from your Internet service provider already loaded onto your computer. We will be using the freeware program, Free Agent for these lessons. Do not fret if you are using a different program. Most, if not all newreaders will allow you to perform these functions:

• subscribe and unsubscribe from newsgroups
• read newsgroup postings
• follow threads of discussion
• post messages to newsgroups
• respond to postings

Let's get started! Get online and fire up Free Agent. When you first start up Free Agent, an empty window will appear if you have not already retrieved a complete list of newsgroups from the news server.

Select Online, Refresh Group List from the menu bar. The process of retrieving several thousand newsgroups may take a while. However, once retrieved, they will be displayed in the Group Pane under the All Groups header.

Scroll through the list of newsgroups for the ones that may be of interest to you. Double-clicking on a particular group will open up the View Empty Group dialog box. If you want to get a feel for the newsgroup before subscribing to it, choose the Sample 50 Article Headers button and Free Agent will retrieve and place them in the Article Pane.

To read any article from the list, highlight that particular article and press Enter on the keyboard. The Retrieval icon will appear under the Status column in the Article Pane indicating that the article is currently being retrieved. After it has been retrieved, this icon will appear instead and the entire article will be displayed in the Body Pane. If an article has already been deleted from the news server and is no longer available for retrieval, this icon will show up in the Status column.

Is there a quick way to figure out which articles have or have not been read? New, unread article headers appear in red; read article headers are in black. Free Agent will also mark old, unread and unwanted article headers as read whenever you retrieve new articles. This will make it easier for you ignore to articles you have no interest in, and for you to spot new unread ones. You may also manually mark an article as read by selecting Article, Mark Article Read.

To subscribe to this newsgroup, keep the current article open in the Body Pane or highlighted in the Article Pane. Select Group, Subscribe or click on the Subscribe button on the toolbar. Another method is to highlight the newsgroup in the Group Pane and then use the same commands to subscribe to it. A newspaper icon will appear next to a subscribed group. You may unsubscribe from a newsgroup at any time by using any of the above methods.

Is it a little too crowded for you with the Group Pane, Article Pane and Body Pane all opened in the same window? You can open up any of the individual three panes into a full screen by clicking on the Maximize icon at the top right-hand corner of the pane you wish to expand.

To access either of the other two panes once you are zoomed in, simply select the appropriate tab above the header bar. To toggle back to a three-pane view, click on the Restore icon or select Navigate, Zoom Window

So you managed to scan through the list of thousands of newsgroups that is available on your news server. There is quite the range of interests and subjects represented, isn't there? And you subscribed to several that interested you. Great!

Subscribing to a newsgroup really is an excellent way of bookmarking the newsgroups that interest you. This means you don't have to scroll through the entire list every time you want to read or post messages to your favourite groups. To view a shortlist of subscribed newsgroups, click on the title bar in the Group Pane to access the Subscribed Groups window. Retrieving article headers for just those subscribed groups is now a matter of simply selecting Online, Get New Headers In Subscribed Groups.

Click on the Group Pane title bar whenever you want to toggle between the All Groups, Subscribed Groups and New Groups windows. What is the New Groups window? There may be newly available newsgroups since the last time you retrieved the complete list. Selecting Online, Get New Groups will automatically place them in this window. New groups will be marked with a icon in the All Groups window.

As you can see, a news reader program can make cyberlife a whole lot easier by helping you keep on top of all those Usenet newsgroups. Another very useful feature that news readers have is tracking and organizing threads of discussion. Threads are groups of related articles on similar subjects within a newsgroup. With the kind of megatraffic that passes through a popular newsgroup, threads are very important. Threads can help eliminate some of the noise by separating the discussions you do want to read from those you don't want to read.

Articles containing threads are indicated by a plus icon next to them in the Article Pane. The number of threads, or responses, to the original posting is indicated in square brackets. (Numbers not encased in brackets represent the number of text lines. This indicates the length of an article.)

Click on the plus to expand and view the threads. Since threads have the same subject as the parent article, only the name of the author is shown. Click on the minus icon to close the threads.

Free Agent also allows you watch or ignore threads. As you are browsing through article headers, you may be interested in the replies to some of them. Choosing Article, Watch Thread from the menu bar will place the icon next to the article and instruct Free Agent to get all new threads when it is retrieving new article headers. Conversely, there may be threads you have no interest in at all. Select Article, Ignore to tag them with the icon. The article and any of its responses, even those retrieved at a later time, will now be marked as read, thus allowing you to ignore them.

A large part of navigating within a newsgroup entails moving between all of those articles. You can do it in one of two ways:

• by selecting the various options under the Navigate menu
• by using the corresponding buttons on the toolbar

Online or Offline? So far, we've been learning the basics of Free Agent by using the program as an online newsreader. You may want to configure Free Agent as an offline reader, especially if you pay an hourly rate for your Internet connection! You will be saving money if you connect to your service provider only for the short duration of retrieving new article headers and articles.

To set up Free Agent as an offline newsreader, open the Preferences dialog box by choosing Preferences from the Options menu. Select the Online Operation tab and then click on the Use Offline Defaults button. It's done!

You retrieve article headers in the same way as you would in the online mode:

Online, Get New Headers In Subscribed Groups

Online, Get New Headers In Selected Groups .