Lesson 11 of the internet specialist 101 course talked about newsgroups and other older technologies and wanted us to describe them. How about discussing this lesson?
A newsgroup is used to communicate with people who subscribe to it. One person I know, Steve Gibson, still uses newsgroups today. Most ISP’s have connections to thee news group community. It is used to communicate with like minded people about whatever the news group moderator wants it to be.
For example, GRC’s site has multiple newsgroups that cover anything that Steve has like Security Now, Spinrite, his new creation SQRL (squirrel) and others. He uses it exclusively to communicate with people who help him test products, give him ideas, and even a miscelanious category if I remember right.
Back in the day, we used DOS to connect to the net and connected a certain way to the newsgroup server. Now-a-day, you can use a program like Outlook Express and thunderbird to connect to the server. I’ve not used newsgroups in a long time, I personally prefer E-mail lists which can work the same way. My personal web site lists E-mail lists I personally moderate, and you just need a modern browser to subscribe or a modern E-mail client to receive and send messages to it.
What interested me about the discussion of newsgroups was the fact that they have been around since I was born. That is a facinating stat seeing that I’ve only been using the Internet since the mid 90s.
E-mail lists can also be moderated, however, the thread can only be stopped by an E-mail to the list asking, or by moderating it until all messages about said topic dies. Thats probably the only hassle to E-mail lists over newsgroups, but I’m not too fond of forums because they can be riddled with Spam even with captcha turned on.
Feel free to discuss this one, and the boards await you.