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AN INTRODUCTION TO USENET NEWS AND THE TRN NEWSREADER,
The purpose of this document is to give you a quick introduction to
Usenet news, and get you started on reading and posting news articles.
The first part is a brief overview of Usenet news and the news-reading
software. The second part is a tutorial on the basic steps involved in
reading and posting news articles. You should read it in sequence, and
work through the examples yourself. The third part is a collection of
intermediate-level topics, in no particular order.
If you find something confusing, or would like me to add something in
a future edition of this note, please let me know. Thanks!
This document assumes that you are using version 3.3 of trn. Some of
the details may be slightly different for other versions. You can find
out which version you are using by typing v (lower case!) at the
newsgroup-selection prompt (read now?). Also, some details depend on
how your news system has been configured. You should contact your news
administrator if you have questions about these. See the section Your
News Administrator for more information.
Overview of Usenet News
Loosely speaking, Usenet is a collection of computers which allow
users to exchange public messages on many different topics. (The term
"Usenet" is also used more precisely to refer to a specific subset of
these messages, as described below.) These messages are similar to
electronic mail, but are transmitted by special software which is
separate from the electronic mail system. They are intended for public
discussions rather than personal communication. If you have ever used
a computer bulletin board service (BBS) or the public discussion areas
of commercial online services (e.g. CompuServe's "forums"), you will
find that Usenet strongly resembles both of these.
A Usenet message is called an article. Articles are grouped by topic
into newsgroups. The entire collection of articles and newsgroups is
called news.
Each Usenet computer maintains a database of articles, which it keeps
up to date by exchanging articles periodically with its "neighbors" on
Usenet. Periodically, your news system receives batches of articles
from its Usenet neighbors; this may happen anywhere from once a day to
once every few minutes. Similarly, your news system periodically sends
locally-created articles to its neighbors. It may also pass its
incoming batches on to some of its neighbors. Finally, your news
system periodically (usually once each night) expires (removes) old
articles to make room for new ones. How long articles are kept can
vary from one newsgroup to another, and depends on the amount of disk
space available and the perceived "value" of the newsgroup.
Usenet and the Internet are not the same thing. Usenet was originally
developed on UNIX computers which set up temporary dial-up telephone
connections among themselves via modems. They exchanged news articles
using the UUCP (UNIX to UNIX copy) protocol which is built into the
UNIX operating system. Many computers still exchange news in this
fashion, but in recent years more and more computers have been using
the permanent high-speed connections of the Internet, exchanging
articles using NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol). Therefore, not
all Usenet computers are part of the Internet, and not all Internet
computers participate in Usenet.
There are more than 1500 commonly distributed newsgroups, on a wide
variety of topics including computers, scientific fields, politics,
national cultures, and hobbies. The total amount of traffic in these
newsgroups is now about 60-70 megabytes per day, and has been
increasing at the rate of about 40-50% a year. Many sites receive only
a limited selection of newsgroups because of limitations in disk space
and the capacity of their network links, or because of specific
policies on what kind of newsgroups can be received.
Newsgroup names generally contain two or more parts, separated by
periods. As you read from left to right, the various parts of the name
progressively narrow the topic of discussion. The first part of the
name indicates the top-level hierarchy to which the newsgroup belongs.
The standard "Big Seven" top-level hierarchies are:
comp
for discussions of computer hardware and software (e.g.
comp.sys.mac.apps, for Macintosh application software)
misc
for discussions which don't fit anywhere else (e.g. misc.kids)
news
for discussions about Usenet news itself: news administration,
creation of new newsgroups, news statistics, etc. (e.g.
news.admin.policy)
rec
for discussions about "recreational" topics: sports, movies,
hobbies, etc. (e.g. rec.sport.baseball, rec.travel,
rec.autos.antique)
sci
for discussions of science-related topics (e.g. sci.physics)
soc
for social and "cultural" discussions relating to various
groups of people (ethnic, national, religious, occupational,
etc.) (e.g. soc.culture.german)
talk
for high-traffic, "noisy" discussions of controversial topics
(abortion, religion, guns, etc.) (e.g. talk.politics.soviet)
Strictly speaking, Usenet consists only of these "Big Seven"
hierarchies. Proposals for new newsgroups in these hierarchies are
discussed and voted upon according to a set of rules known as "The
Guidelines." If you're interested in learning about this process, read
the article How to Create a New Usenet Newsgroup in
news.announce.newusers, news.groups, news.admin.misc,
news.announce.newgroups, or news.answers. Then read both
news.announce.newgroups and news.groups for a few weeks to get a
feeling for Usenet politics.
There is a somewhat widely distributed alt hierarchy which contains
newsgroups that are too "big" (e.g. contain large files of encoded
computer graphics), too controversial (sex, drugs, etc.), or too
"off-the-wall" for the standard Usenet hierarchies, along with many
newsgroups on "mainstream" topics. Creating a new newsgroup is much
easier in the alt hierarchy than in the standard hierarchies, so a new
newsgroup is sometimes created there with the intention of building
enough traffic to justify creating a newsgroup in one of the standard
hierarchies, or if there is not enough interest in creating one there.
For more information, read the article So You Want to Create an Alt
Newsgroup in alt.config, news.groups or news.answers. Then read
alt.config for a while.
Finally, there are various special-purpose hierarchies which are not
distributed as widely as the "Big Seven" and alt. Some of these focus
on specialized fields, for example, bionet for biology, hepnet for
high-energy particle physics, and vmsnet for users of computers from
Digital Equipment, Inc. which run the VMS operating system. Others are
intended mainly for distribution within limited geographical areas or
within single institutions, for example ba for the San Francisco Bay
area or de for Germany.
Which newsgroups you might want to read obviously depends on your
interests. You should browse through the newsgroup lists and sample
various groups. I strongly recommend that you at least scan the
following newsgroups:
news.announce.important
contains important messages of interest to all Usenet users.
Very few articles appear here.
news.announce.newusers
contains a standard set of articles with general information
about Usenet, and guidelines for network etiquette
(netiquette). You should read through these articles at least
once.
news.answers
contains copies of articles which are periodically posted to
various newsgroups, answering various "Frequently Asked
Questions" (FAQs). These are worth browsing through in order to
get an idea of the range of topics which are discussed on
Usenet.
news.newusers.questions
contains questions posted by new users and (hopefully) answers
from more knowledgeable users.
You can usually find complete lists of "Big Seven" and alt newsgroups,
with very brief descriptions, in the newsgroups news.lists and
news.announce.newusers.
Your News Administrator
Most Usenet sites have a news administrator who for maintains the news
software, monitors disk space, creates new newsgroups, etc. On small
systems, this person may simply be the overall system administrator.
On larger systems, the system administrator may designate someone else
as news administrator. The job may be only part of the person's
overall responsibilities, and it may even be strictly a spare-time
job.
If you have any questions which might depend on how the news software
is set up on your particular system, you should contact your news
administrator. For example, if you want to read a newsgroup which is
not currently available on your system, your news administrator is the
only person who can either arrange to receive that newsgroup, or
explain why that is not possible.
The only sure way to find out the identity of your news administrator
is to talk to people at your computer center. Many systems define the
e-mail address usenet for use by the news administrator. You could
also try sending a message to root or postmaster or whatever other
address your system administrator uses.
Overview of the trn Newsreader
To read news and post new articles, one uses a program called a
newsreader. The newsreader program which is described in this
document is called trn ("threaded read news"). It is an extension of
the venerable rn ("read news"), originally written by Larry Wall of
NASA. The threading extensions were added by Wayne Davison of Borland,
Inc.
In addition to the fundamental organization of articles by subject
area into newsgroups, trn links followup articles (replies) to their
parent articles to form threads of discussion on particular topics.
Actually, an article may attract several direct replies, each of which
in turn receives replies; and so the resulting collection of articles
is better described as a "tree" rather then a "thread." Nevertheless,
"thread" is the standard term.
When you enter a newsgroup, trn presents a menu of the discussion
threads which are currently active. It allows you to select only those
threads which you want to read, and ignore the others. It also
presents articles within a thread (or tree) in an orderly sequence, so
that you can follow the discussion easily. Finally, trn keeps track of
which articles you have read in each newsgroup, so that once you have
read an article, or have told trn to mark it as read, it disappears
from the selection menus.
Trn normally operates on three levels:
1. newsgroup selection level
2. thread selection level
3. article reading level
There is also an "article selection level," a holdover from the
original rn, which allows you to select individual articles directly,
without regard to discussion threads. You will not normally use it.
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