[LMB] AKICOT:L Usenet for a Dummy?

[Mark Allums]

James M. BRYANT G4CLF wrote:
> I want to learn to use Usenet.
> 
> Google produces too many advice
> pages, with no way of determining
> their quality.
> 
> Can anyone give me some advice
> on how a bear of little brain
> should start, please?
> 
> James - BOLB

Well, get a good newsreader, to start with.  Thunderbird, the email 
program, will read news.  There are better ones.  Web reading is 
sometimes unsatisfactory.

Don't fall prey to the temptation to visit most of the binary groups. 
The software is malware-infested, the movies are pirated and illegal, 
and many of the photography interest groups are peppered with child 
pr0n.  If you do visit binary groups, subscribe to the moderated ones. 
No spam, and so on.  If photographs are our interest, make sure your 
newsreader can handle yEnc jpgs.  Lots of the high res pictures are 
transmitted with a binary encoding that is more efficient, using less 
bandwidth, but not every program is born knowing yEnc.  (It is probably 
not a big problem, these days.)

There are lots of different newsgroup providers, with varying degrees of 
completeness.  Your ISP may provide news.  Some are censored, not 
necessarily a bad thing.  Some are slow, some are faster.  Some are 
free, some are for pay.

There are some famous ones, such as arts.rec.sf.*  (Do I have that 
right?  Or is it alt.rec.sf.*?  Haven't read any of them in years.)

I'm sure there will be other listies with more and better information.



-- 
Mark Allums