Newsgrouper Help

Logging In/Out Selecting Groups Reading a group Reading a thread Preferences Historical Search About/Contact

Introduction

This website provides access to the worldwide Usenet discussion system. Usenet was established in 1980 and may be considered the first "social network". It is organised into Groups for the discussion of particular topics and/or for particular geographical areas. Within a group, messages (also called articles, or posts) are grouped into discussion threads. A thread consists of an initial messages, followed any replies to that message and replies to the replies etc..

Usenet is also referred to as Network News or Newsgroups. This is because it was originally conceived as a low-traffic distributed notice-board type system for publicising announcements to a particular community. It then grew into a general discussion medium, but the "News" name stuck.

Usenet later started to be used (or misused) as a means of distributing binary files such as images, videos and executable software. These require much larger storage and transmission capacity, and are often of doubtful legality, so this site does not support that use.

Note that Usenet is a collaborative system, there is no central authority in overall control. It exists on servers spread across multiple countries and cultures. Responsible administrators work to exclude illegal and exploitative content. However it is entirely possible you will come across postings you find objectionable. There are groups which have fallen into disuse over the years or become dominated by a few cranks, but there are also groups with active and constructive communities.

Wikipedia has more background on the Usenet system.

Anyone can use this site as a guest, but only registered users can post messages. This restriction is needed to guard against misuse, e.g. by spammers. Apart from posting, guest users have full access. However when a guest logs out, their history and any preferences they may have set are forgotten. Registered users can log out and log in again later without this information being lost.

Any time you try to access the site without being logged in you will get the login page. When logged in you can click "Log Out" at the top right to log out.

Selecting Groups

Once logged in, you will see a home page containing:

Groups previously read - If you have previously read any groups, you will see them listed first under this heading. If one of these is no longer of interest you can delete it from the list by clicking the X in the last column. The "New" column shows how many new posts have been made to that group since you last read it. Groups with new posts are highlighted. Clicking the group name will enter that group.
Find groups to read - Here you can search for groups whose names and/or descriptions include some text you can enter. Note that if you select "Matching this pattern" the pattern-matching is done "glob" style, i.e.
- * matches any sequence of characters, including none
- ? matches any single character
- [xyz] matches any single one of the characters inside the brackets
Clicking "Search" will produce a list of matching groups, where you can click a group's name to enter that group.
Find an article by message-id - Every posting in the Usenet system has a unique identifier which looks something like <[email protected]>. If you have a reference to a message in this form you can search for it here.
Guide to the most active groups - Clicking this will take you to a page which tries to give some guidance on which groups are the most active, in three categories:
- Top ten groups most read here - the groups most read by users on this site
- Top twenty groups with most posts globally - the groups with the most new posts in the past few weeks from any source
- Active groups list from big-8.org - a list of groups recommended as being active and healthy by a reputable source
Clicking on the name of a group in any of these lists will enter that group.

Reading a group

Once you select a group you will get a page which lists recent discussion threads in that group. For each thread you see the subject, originator (the person who started the thread), start date, total number of posts, and the number of posts which are new since your last visit to this group. Threads which have new posts will be highlighted. You can click the subject to read the thread. By default the newest threads are shown first, but clicking the header of the Date column will reverse this order.

At the bottom of this page there are four buttons:

Older Posts - if there are more posts available in this group than currently shown, clicking this will take you to the next page of posts.
New Thread - this is only enabled for registered users, it lets you make a post to the group which is not part of an existing thread. You will get a page where you can type your Subject and message, then click Post to send it, or Quit to abandon it.
Find Articles - this leads to a page where you can search the history of this group, see the Finding Articles section below.
Group Charter - this tries to display the charter i.e. the founding document of the group. This sets out the purpose of the group and any particular rules to be followed in it. However some groups have no charter that can be found.

You can return to the Home page by clicking Newsgrouper at the top, or with keyboard shortcut: Esc.

Reading a thread

Once you select a thread you get a page which lists all the posts in the thread on the left, and shows one of these messages on the right. The list of posts tries to display the structure of the discussion by connecting each reply to the message it is replying to. New posts are highlighted in yellow. The currently displayed post is highlighted in green. Clicking an entry in the list will load that message on the right.

Navigation

If you are using a device with a keyboard, and Javascript is enabled, the functions for moving around a thread can be driven by keyboard shortcuts which are listed below. In any case, the same functions can be driven by clicking the buttons listed next.

At the end of the current post shown on the right there are eight buttons:

Next Article - this takes you to the next post in the thread. Keyboard shortcut: +
Previous - this takes you to the previous post in the thread. Keyboard shortcut: -
Next New - this takes you to the next new post in the thread. Keyboard shortcut: Enter
Post Reply - this is only enabled for registered users, and takes you to a page where you can compose and send a reply to the current post. You will get a page where you can compose your message, then click Post to send it, or Quit to abandon it. The Subject will default to that of the post you are replying to, but can be changed. The text of the post you are replying to will be quoted at the start of your message - it is generally wise to trim this down to that part which is relevant to your reply, then add what you have to say after that.
Block Poster - this takes you to a page where you can confirm or cancel that you do not want to see any more messages from the poster of the current message.
View Source - this will display the current message in raw, unprocessed form. Keyboard shortcut: V
Markup - this enables/disables the Markup option. When on, a few simple forms of text emphasis which are conventional on Usenet are applied:
- *words* is shown in bold
- /words/ is shown in italic
- _words_ is shown underlined
The current state is indicated by X for off and a Tick for on. It defaults to off. Keyboard shortcut: M
Wrap - this enables/disables the Wrap Long Lines option. When on, text is displayed in a proportionally-spaced font and long lines are wrapped. When off, text uses a fixed-width font and long lines are not wrapped. The current state is indicated by X for off and a Tick for on. It defaults to off. Keyboard shortcut: W

Note that Blocking of Posters, Markup and Wrap can also be set in the Preferences page.

At the end of the list of posts on the left there are three buttons:

Next Thread - this takes you to the next thread in the group.
Previous - this takes you to the previous thread in the group.
Next with New Posts - this takes you to the next thread in the group which has any new posts, if such a thread exists. Keyboard shortcut: N

You can return to the Group page by clicking the group name at the top, or with keyboard shortcut: Esc.

Preferences

Clicking the Preferences button at the top right will take you to the Preferences page. This has the following settings which you can modify:

Groups To Show - this field contains a list of the groups which will appear on your home page. They are listed one per line, followed by the highest article number when you last read that group. You can edit this list, to re-order, add or delete groups, even to load a list of groups from another source. The article numbers can be omitted, in which case the whole group will appear to be unread when you next enter it.
Newest Threads - here you can select whether the newest threads appear at the top or bottom of the list of group threads.
Blocked Posters - this field contains a list of posters whose posts will be filtered out so you do not see them. It should have one entry per line. The entry should be the email address they use when posting, not the free-form name they may have also.
Markup in Posts - this is the same Markup option described in the Thread Navigation section.
Wrap Long Lines - this is the same Wrap option described in the Thread Navigation section.

The following three options affect posting, so are only relevant to registered users.

Posting Name - this is the free-form name which will be put in the From field of your posts. Note that the pseudo-email address which will be added after this is not editable.
Signature - if anything is entered here it will be added as a signature at the end of each post you make.
Extra Headers - if anything is entered here it will be added to the header section of your posts. This may be used to add optional header lines, such as Organisation: the Men In Black or an X-Face image. Beware, a malformed header may cause your posts to fail, so leave this empty unless you really know what you are doing.

Then there is a section where you can select the colours of background and text used for different aspects of the display.

Finally we have Save, Cancel and Reset Colours to Defaults buttons which do what they say.

Historical Search

Clicking Find Articles at the end of a group page leads to a page where you can search the history of that group, going back around 20 years. The search options here are similar to those described above for searching for groups, but will look for the specified text or pattern in the Subject, From, or References header lines of group articles.

Clicking Search will run the search and produce a list of articles found, if any, showing Subject, From and Date. Clicking a Subject in this list will display that article. The article page has options for navigation and display similar to those for reading current articles, but there are also two options for finding other articles related to this one:

Find replies to this post - this will find any follow-up posts which have this post's Message-Id in their References line.
Find earlier posts this one refers to - this will use the References header line in this post to find any posts which this one is a follow-up to.

About Newsgrouper / Contact Information

This service operates as a web interface to the excellent eternal-september.org Usenet server and therefore provides the same content that they do. Historical searches now use blueworldhosting.com as they have more history available.

This service is a hobby project and provides no guarantees of availability, correct operation or anything else.

For any questions, comments, compliments or complaints please contact [email protected]

This is Newsgrouper version 0.7.2. The source code is now online here.