Forum Archive Index - November 2003

["tennyson@caverock.net.nz" <tennyson@caverock.net.nz>]

Hi winner69 and ryannite

> 
>Think snoopy was referring to this
> 
>http://groups.google.co.nz/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-
8&group=aus.invest
> 

Yes, although this is the 'web interface' way to view it.    Most ISPs 
have a 'news server' which hosts these discussion groups.   I'm not 
really sure why it is called a news server.  It certainly doesn't follow 
that most of what is said 'news worthy'.

Discussion groups are a form of e-mail list.  There are literally tens of 
thousands of them covering all subjects that you could possibly 
imagine.    To read them you can 'subscribe' to them.  Providing you 
already have an internet connection subscription doesn't usually cost 
anything extra.   You can 'unsubscribe' at any time.  One advantage of 
discussion groups over regular e-mail lists is that, with off line reading,  
you can download a set of message headers first, and then only 
download  the content of the message if it sounds interesting to you.  

A certain order is brought to these lists by something called the 'big 
eight'  (IIRC) naming convention.  However, anyone *can* set up a 
discussion group on any subject.   So how good they are is really up to 
the contributors that turn up.   As with any completely unmoderated 
forum there are some contributors, the usual term is posters, who are 
not worth listening to.    Many specialised discussion group reading 
programs have the ability to 'killfile', that is automatically delete posts 
from, a contributor that you don't want to hear from.

Like regular e-mail lists, spammers use harvested addresses from 
discussion lists to build up names for spamming, so be careful.  
However, there is no risk from simply 'reading' them.

I believe that many of the e-mail programs out there have 'adjuncts' 
that deal specifically with newsgroups.   However, there are several 
dedicated newsgroup/discussion group programs out there as well.
The one I use is something called 'Free Agent', which as the name 
implies is free, and I find it works very well.  However, there are others 
no doubt equally as good out there.

There is a service within google called 'group google' which archives 
all the posts in the 'big 8' groups and some more.
I hope that is of interest to potential readers of the discussion group 
'aus.invest'.

SNOOPY




--
Message sent by Snoopy 
on Pegasus Mail version 4.02
----------------------------------
"Sometimes to see the wood from the trees, 
you have to cut down all the trees."




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