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What is Usenet/Newsgroups?
Usenet is the 'news' service of the Internet, just as WWW is the hypertext service, so Usenet is just another standard part of the Internet. If you're reading this on your computer then you probably have an Internet account and you probably have access to Usenet, it's just that you don't use it.
Usenet is made up of Newsgroups, there are over 35,000 of them catering for just about every subject imaginable even some that you don't want to know about, uk.rec.scuba is just one of these thousands of newsgroups.
How do I use it?
A Newsgroup is a bit like email and is used like email, you send and receive text messages, but instead of sending them to specific people you send the messages to a News Server which then broadcasts them all over the world for anyone to read. You can send whatever messages you like to whatever Newsgroups you like, but if you want a quiet life please stick to the Charter ('rules') of the Newsgroups you're sending messages to.
Ideally you need a what is known as a News Client application on your computer, Outlook Express is a News client - see later for how to set it up. It is best to use a proper News Client, they allow you to work off-line just like with email.
However you can access uk.rec.scuba newsgroups from the web using Google Groups.
How does it work?
You don't need to know in detail but I'll give a short explanation - it will show why you have to set it up on your computer. It's slightly different to the WWW (which you are using now) in that there are there are thousands of News Servers all over the world all holding the same messages.
For the WWW each site (like this one) normally resides on one WWW Server, everybody gets their copy of a page from this one place. News is slightly different, you send and receive messages normally via your ISP's News Server. All the News Servers then get together and exchange messages, so eventually (it may take a few hours) any message you send will 'propagate' to the rest of the world.
So that's the main difference, to use Usenet Newsgroups you have to tell your News Client software what News Server it is to use to send and receive messages.
Note that not all News Servers carry all Newsgroups, the decision as to which ones to carry is down to the ISP who owns the news server.
Whats on there?
As anybody can read your messages anybody can respond and you can respond to anybody else's messages, topics (called 'threads') build up with many people contributing, there will be several topics running at the same time. The following shows what we were talking about in late December 1999 -
We're just exchanging information and ideas and asking questions. In short - anything relevant to diving in the UK (and abroad) can be and is discussed on the uk.rec.scuba Newsgroup.
Setting up and Joining in...
Most ISP's have a help page, I'm not going to go through the exact details here. It might be worth just trying to use Usenet Newsgroups with your current set-up, if you've installed all your Internet software from an ISP's CD then it might already be set up for you. The main thing you need to know is the name of the News Server to connect to, this is normally the word 'news.' followed by the ISP's domain name. e.g. Demon's News Server is news.demon.co.uk - but you won't be able to use it unless you've dialled into a Demon account.
So the first place to look will be your own ISP's help pages...
