[TIP] New Deja.com users please read this!
Jon Bell
If you are already familiar with newsgroups and have come to Deja.com as
an alternate source for them, then you are probably already familiar with
most of the material in this posting.
However, if you have never used newsgroups before, and are making your
first acquaintance with these forums via Deja.com, then...
Welcome to Usenet! Newsgroups can be a valuable tool for finding
information and connecting to people who share your interests. While you
are becoming acquainted with them, you need to be aware of the following
things about the relationship between Deja.com and its "discussion
forums":
1. The standard and almost universal term for these things is
"newsgroups." The overall collection of newsgroups is often called
"Usenet" or "netnews" or just plain "news." The terms "news" and
"newsgroups" are somewhat unfortunate because they have little to do with
"real news" such as you get from newspapers or from cnn.com, but they
*are* nevertheless the ones used by people who actually use newsgroups.
2. Newsgroups have existed many times longer than Deja.com. Usenet began
in 1979, as a project by some graduate students at Duke University and the
University of North Carolina (USA). Deja.com began about 1995 as a
searchable "archive" of newsgroup postings, under the name of DejaNews.
It did not originally have the ability to subscribe and post to
newsgroups. More recently it introduced these features, along with the
ability to create your own "communities." In May 1999 it changed its name
from DejaNews to Deja.com.
3. Deja.com is only a small part of Usenet. Most people who read
newsgroups do not use Deja.com. Newsgroups are distributed via tens of
thousands of "news servers" all over the world, operated by Internet
service providers for their customers, by universities and schools for
their students and faculty, and by companies for their employees. Most
people who read and post to newsgroups do so via one of these servers.
To access these servers, people use the newsgroup-reading features that
are built into various Web browsers (e.g. Netscape Communicator), or
stand-alone newsreading software such as Forte Agent or News Xpress.
(You cannot use these to connect to Deja.com's servers; you must use their
Web-based interface, so that you are exposed to the advertisements that
actually pay for the service.)
You yourself probably have free access to at least one of these servers,
via your ISP, university or company. If you're connecting to the net
through a commercial ISP, you are already paying for this service as part
of your monthly fee. Ask them whether this is the case, and if so, how to
connect to their news server. You may find that this server does not
carry some newsgroups that you want to read, or that it "misses" many
postings, or that it does not keep postings long enough for you to read.
In those cases Deja.com may provide a better newsgroup service for you.
But if your own news server gives satisfactory service, you will probably
find it to be faster and more efficient than Deja.com for normal
newsgroup-reading.
Deja.com does provide a very valuable service in that it archives postings
for years and allows you to search them in a variety of ways by using the
"Power Search" (http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml). It also provides free
access to newsgroups that your own server does not carry, and it provides
one method for easily setting up your own newsgroup-like discussion areas.
4. Most of the so-called "discussion forums" that Deja.com offers to you
are newsgroups that are part of the world-wide Usenet and do not originate
from Deja.com. The only exceptions (as far as I can tell) are the
newsgroups whose names begin with "deja." (e.g. deja.newusers). These are
"local" to Deja.com and exist only on Deja.com's server.
Finally, if you have general questions about newsgroups and Usenet (as
opposed to specific questions about how to use Deja.com), you are welcome
to subscribe to the newsgroup 'news.newusers.questions' and post them
there. The moderators and "helpers" in that newsgroup maintain a Web site
with much general information about newsgroups, at the address shown in my
"signature" below.
--
Jon Bell <jtb...@presby.edu> Presbyterian College
Dept. of Physics and Computer Science Clinton, South Carolina USA
[ Newsgroup information for beginners: http://www.geocities.com/nnqweb/ ]