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What are news groups?
News Groups are simply a form for people to let people exchange views and ideas. Newsgroups are organized according to their specific areas of concentration. Since the groups are in a tree structure, the various areas are called hierarchies. There are seven major categories:
'comp'
Topics of interest to both computer professionals and hobbyists, including topics in computer science, software sources, and information on hardware and software systems.
'misc'
Group addressing themes not easily classified into any of the other headings or which incorporate themes from multiple categories. Subjects include fitness, job-hunting, law, and investments.
'sci'
Discussions marked by special knowledge relating to research in or application of the established sciences.
'soc'
Groups primarily addressing social issues and socializing. Included are discussions related to many different world cultures.
'talk'
Groups largely debate-oriented and tending to feature long discussions without resolution and without appreciable amounts of generally useful information.
'news'
Groups concerned with the news network, group maintenance, and software.
'rec'
Groups oriented towards hobbies and recreational activities
These "world" newsgroups are (usually) circulated around the entire Usenet--this implies world-wide distribution. Not all groups actually enjoy such wide distribution, however. The European Usenet and Eunet sites take only a selected subset of the more "technical" groups, and controversial "noise" groups are often not carried by many sites in the U.S. and Canada (these groups are primarily under the 'talk' and 'soc' classifications). Pictures can also be posted in news groups by converting the binary state into text, and then 'decoding' the text back to binary at the users end. Many sites do not carry some or all of the comp.binaries groups because of the typically large size of the posts in them (being actual executable programs).
Also available are a number of "alternative" hierarchies:
'alt'
True anarchy; anything and everything can and does appear; subjects include sex, the Simpsons, and privacy.
'gnu'
Groups concentrating on interests and software with the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. For further info on what the FSF is, see Section 8.3.4 [FSF].
'biz'
Business-related groups.
To find out more about newsgroups read this.
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