Newsgroup access tips

This DIY FAQ Wiki is a companion to the uk.d-i-y newsgroup on usenet.

The concept of usenet and newsgroups is unfamiliar to many users of the internet who may only be familiar with web browsers (e.g. Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer) and email clients (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook Express). Some will come across usenet groups via Google groups and may encounter the suggestion that they use a "real newsreader" if they want to contribute: this article attempts to explain further.

Usenet versus WWW

There are two basic ways of reading and posting to a usenet group:

1. via a program running on your computer, accessing a usenet news server directly
2. via a web based "front end" such as Google groups

News server access

Usenet pre-dates the world-wide web (the Wikipedia article gives more detail) and is inherently "text only": messages do not include graphics or sophisticated typography or layout. What it does do well is organise heirarchies of discussions between people accessing groups via servers distributed all over the world.

Traditionally, programs called newsreaders are used to access usenet: these are similar to email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft's Outlook Express, and indeed these email clients include newsreaders. Separate stand-alone newsreaders are also available, including Forte Free Agent for Windows and Pan for Linux.

Good newsreaders offer features that enable their users to keep on top of the flood of messages encountered in groups such as uk.d-i-y. These include filtering capabilities to remove content one doesn't want to read (such as identifiable spam, or posts from particularly disliked individuals) and tagging of discussion one is interested in.

This form of access, using a newsreader, is probably the most productive way of participating in groups like uk.d-i-y.

Web based access

These days there are a number of web based interfaces that allow access to usenet. The best known is Google groups, from which one can access uk.d-i-y here. Google groups is very good for searching through previous postings, and OK for reading and contributing to groups occasionally. However frequent users find this a very slow way to interact and it lacks much of the filtering flexibility offered by the dedicated applications.

Furthermore, a lot of newsgroup spammers tend to post via Google groups, which has meant that many savvy users opt to filter out anything posted that way in an effort to minimise the quantity of spam they have to wade through. Unfortunately this means that if you submit a genuine post via Google groups it won't be seen by a some people - who, being 'savvy', may be just the readers one wants to reach!

Other web sites also offer web access, but without the advantages of Google's search capabilities. These generally offer a very poor user experience (in fact many exist just to scrape free "content" from usenet so as to land more search results on pay-per-click links etc.

News servers

Many ISPs provide a news server as a part of their basic connectivity offerings. Alas this is becoming less universal as ISPs fight to drive costs down. Even for the many that do, not many of them treat usenet as a priority service.

ISP Servers

To access your ISPs news server you simply need to know its name (or possibly its IP address), and enter this into the relevant configuration screen on your software. Note that most ISPs will only allow their own subscribers to access their news server. You may be able to find this from your ISP's web site or help pages; failing that their technical support helpline. It may be guessable: try news.yourisp.whatever; or Googling (the web or usenet) for "yourisp news server", "yourisp news server address" or "yourisp nntp server" etc may give you the answer.

Third Party servers

For customers of ISPs that do not provide usenet servers there are a number of third party servers that can be used instead. Some are free, while others require a subscription such as GigaNews and Individual.Net. The latter is ideal for access to mainly text groups like uk.d-i-y, the former is more suited to people who need fast access to the larger binary groups that many of the free or ISP provided servers do not carry (or only carry for a very short time).

News Clients

Outlook Express

Setup

1. Select Accounts... from the tools menu.
2. Click the Add button and choose "News"
3. Enter your name, click Next
4. Enter your email address (preferably obfuscated), and click Next
5. Enter the name or IP address of your news server, and leave the tick box about news server log in un ticked. Click Next
6. Click Finish
7. Click Close

You can now right click on the new entry on the left and select "Newsgroups..." to select groups to subscribe to.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a free open source mail and news client from the Mozilla organisation. You can download the latest version here.

Setup

1. Choose "Account Options..." from the Tools menu.
2. Click the Add Account button
3. Select "Newsgroup Account" and click Next
4. Enter your name and email address (you may wish to disguise this to prevent it being harvested by spammers). Click Next
5. Now enter the name of your news server, then click Next
6. Finally you can give the account a name to make it easy to recognise (handy if you use more than one server).

If you now finish the account creation, you will see a new entry for the news account in the folders section of your display. Click on this and then the Manage newsgroup subscriptions to start selecting the groups you want to read.

Tips

You can greatly enhance your usenet experience with the creation of a few filters.

Select message filters from the Tools menu.

1. Create a new filter and call it "Me"
2. Set the match criteria to "Match all of the following", and select the "From" field "Contains" and enter your name in the last box.
3. Finally in the Perform these actions section, enter two actions. The first to "Tag Message" as "Personal". This will ensure that any messages you post are highlighted in a different colour (you can create additional filters for other posters that you like reading so that their messages are also highlighted). The second action is to "Watch Thread". This will make it very easy to see at a glance which threads you have contributed to, and see and followups posted to them.

Using the threads option on the View menu will allow you to select "all" messages or "Watched threads with unread". When you select the latter, the only threads shown will be ones that you have participated in and which have new posts.

If there is a thread that you want to follow but have not posted to yet, you can make it appear in the filtered results by pushing "w" to toggle its watch status.

If you see a thread that is spam or you are not at all interested in, you can hit "k". This will collapse the thread and mark it as "killed". Next time you open the list of messages, you won't even see it.

If you have been using Outlook Express, Thunderbird can import most of your mail and news messages, address book, and other settings.

You may wish to install the MNENHY extension

The NEWSWORTHY extension was helpful too, but hasn't yet been updated for Thunderbird 2.0.x