This page's purpose
is mainly to serve as a valuable source for a couple of postings that have
been
created to help new
users on both Internet and Usenet to find their way around. Most of the
documents
that are available
here for download are as well to be found on every better newsserver ,
most of them
in the 'news.announce.newusers'
group.
I've been reading
and watching the newsgroup 'news.newusers.questions' for several years.
It has
always been a group
with a lot of 'noise' in it, which is understandable since the group's
name is
attractive for new
users. Unfortunately, with the upcoming of graphical newsreaders and the
rapidly
growing number of
Internet Service Providers and their customers, this group has been flooded
with
completely off-topic postings. This is due to the fact that most newsreaders
come preconfigured with
only a small number
of active newsgroups - news.newusers.questions being among them. Since
the
traffic in the group
is incredibly high nowadays, I started automailing the authors of off-topic
postings
using a Perl script to try reducing the 'email me' and 'test' postings.
Basically, I'm therefor just scanning
for certain keywords.
This is a time-consuming thing and not always welcome, but most of the
recipients of my
messages were quite happy to see that somebody was trying to help them,
and asked
for more information.
I did this quite often, but sending 50kB files as mail attachments isn't
a very good
way to do it - and since most people do have WWW access nowadays, I decided
to put this into my
webpages. I´ve stopped emailing the posters when several others stepped
in, and the discussion of changing
that newsgroup´s status finally became more concrete.
In the meanwhile,
NNQ has become a moderated group, and the noise has been reduced to an
un-
avoidable minimum
(most of the moderation process is handled by a smart robot, but there´s
still
a lot of stuff that
has to be reviewed by the human moderators). The need for information,
however,
is still there.
 |
Usenet
Glossary
This is a short glossary on expressions commonly used on Usenet. |
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What
is Usenet ?
A short introduction into Usenet, written by Mark Moraes. |
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What
is Usenet ? A second opinion. This one is an add-on to the former,
by Eric Vielmetti.
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Rules
for Posting to Usenet
You should have a look at this one _prior_ to inadvertently cause another flame war... |
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A
Primer on How to work with the Usenet community
This file describes in a nice way what you should remember and take care of when dealing with Usenet newsgroups (and the real persons behind the postings). |
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Emily
Postnews answers your questions on Netiquette
This one is not for the humoristically unimpaired. It is describing - with lots of sarcasm - what you should never do on Usenet. I like it :) |
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How
to find people's email addresses
This document explains how to find out other people's email addresses. you will , however, need at least some information about the persons in questions (where they work or similar). |
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How
to become a Usenet site
This document deals with the pros and cons of becoming a Usenet site and what actually will be needed for this. |
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A
Guide to Buying And Selling On Usenet
If you're interested in using Usenet for shopping, you might want to look at this one. |
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How
to create a new Usenet group
This is a short introduction into the process of creating a new Usenet news group, especially for groups located within the Big8 hierarchy. |