From: nnqadmp2@presby.edu (NNQ Moderation Board)
Subject: What newsgroups are and how they work
Newsgroups: news.announce.newusers
Approved: nnq-adm at presby.edu
X-No-Archive: yes
Message-ID: <02-what.txt.1146485101@presby.edu>

*Newsgroups* are a means of public discussion and distribution of material
to a large number of people.  They share this fundamental purpose with
electronic mailing lists, Web-based bulletin boards, etc.  Newsgroups can
appear to be very much like one of these other kinds of forums, depending
on how you access them.  Nevertheless, newsgroups are different from them
in important ways, and each kind of forum has its own quirks, advantages
and disadvantages.

Newsgroup messages are not stored in a single central location (as with a
Web-based bulletin board) or distributed from a single central location
(as with an electronic mailing list).  Instead, they are stored on a
multitude of *news servers* that are operated by Internet service
providers (ISPs) for their customers, by schools and universities for
their students and staff, by companies for their employees, etc.

When someone posts a message in a newsgroup, it is first stored on his/her
provider's news server.  That server then distributes copies of the
message to its *peers*, that is, to other servers with which it has agreed
to exchange newsgroup messages directly.  Those servers then distribute
copies to _their_ peers, and so on, until (in principle) all the servers
which carry that newsgroup have a copy of the message.  When someone reads
a message in a newsgroup, he/she is reading the copy that is stored on
his/her provider's news server.

Some newsgroups are *moderated*.  In these newsgroups, the poster's server
sends messages directly to a *moderator* for inspection.  If the moderator
approves a message, he/she posts it on his/her provider's news server, and
it propagates from there to other servers (including yours).

For more details about the newsgroup distribution mechanism, see:

    <http://members.fortunecity.com/nnqweb/how-it-works.html>.

People read and post to newsgroups using *news clients* (also called
*newsreaders*) such as Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Outlook
Express, and a variety of other software packages for Windows, Unix, MacOS
and other operating systems.  These newsreaders communicate with news
servers via the NNTP protocol (Network News Transfer Protocol).  NNTP also
specifies how news servers exchange messages with each other.

Some servers make newsgroup messages available via a Web-based interface
that can be used with any Web browser.

If you have followup questions about this article, please post them in
news.newusers.questions.  If you try to post them in
news.announce.newusers, they will simply be returned to you.

Also, please send e-mail to us only if you have specific corrections to
the material in this posting, or other administrative questions about
news.announce.newusers.  For answers to other questions, please use the
following resources:

  + Your newsreader software's documentation
  + Your Internet service provider's support staff 
  + The news.newusers.questions web site
       <http://members.fortunecity.com/nnqweb/>
  + A web search engine such as <http://www.google.com/>
  + The newsgroup news.newusers.questions, for questions about newsgroups
  + Other appropriate newsgroups, for other kinds of questions

This article was last revised on 18 December 2003

-- 
The NNQ Moderation Board <nnq-adm at presby.edu>