Chapter 10. Discussions

Table of Contents
Introduction
Posting Messages

Introduction

This is an application for accessing UseNet News (also known as NetNews, News, or Discussion Groups). Usenet News is a publicly accessible Internet collection of electronic discussion groups (called newsgroups), each devoted to a specific topic. There are tens of thousands of newsgroups, arranged in a hierarchy with each level of the hierarchy separated by a dot (".") character. Some of the major hierarchies are "alt" for discussion of alternative topics, "comp" for computer topics, and "sci" for science topics. From the major hierarchies, individual newsgroups or lower hierarchies are formed.

People can read and post articles (also called postings or messages) to relevant newsgroups. The people who contribute worthwhile postings to newsgroups make the system an invaluable resource. Unfortunately, many postings are not of worthwhile content, and the "signal to noise" in un-moderated groups can be very low.

Navigating Newsgroups

When you first access the Discussions application, you will be presented with a listing of the top level UseNet hierarchy, from which you can navigate the list of discussion groups. For example, if you click on the "plus sign" link to the left of the group titled "soc" it will expand into a list of the forums and further hierarchies within the "society" hierarchy. The name of each newsgroup (such as soc.answers, soc.athiesm, etc.) is listed as a link. You can click on the newsgroup names to view a list of their posted messages and/or subgroups.

After viewing messages, you can return to this top-level listing of newsgroups by clicking on the Browse menu icon at the top of the page.

Viewing Articles and Threads

You can view articles in two views: a simple listing of postings sorted in some manner, or by threads.

Many newsgroup postings are replies to previous postings. A string of successive replies to the same posting forms what is called a thread. It is often useful to view messages via such a threaded view, so that you can read (or skip) all the messages of each subject in sequence. This is especially useful if you want to reply to a posting, as threading lets you easily check if someone else has already posted the same reply.