Newsgroups

From The Newcastle upon Tyne Wiki

Newsgroups introduction

• There are text only Newsgroups and Binary Newsgroups.

The text only groups are for simple question and answer dialogues similar to a bulletin board while the Binary Newsgroups have files that you can download. For example, there is a Folk music binary group full of music files that you can download and listen to and is a great way to discover new music from places like Bosnia that you might never have heard of and might otherwise never have discoverd by normal shopping channels.

• You need a Newsgroup reader to connect to a server and to download the list of subject headers - Outlook Express does a good job
• Or you can use a web-based Newsgroup reader but you are then probably missing out on the hundreds of available groups that might not be listed.

The best Newsgroup provider

Your Broadband provider might provide a Newsgroup service but nowadays it is likely to be a very limited, censored version. Or you can subscribe separately to a service such as Newsgroup-Binaries.com which provides a very reasonably priced service.

Newsgroup websites

search all Newsgroups