Introduction to WebTV™: Newsgroups

What They Are

A newsgroup is a collection of posts, messages, collected into threads following (supposedly) a train of thought in a discussion. To get to newsgroups from your WebTV Home page, click Community on the sidebar, then Discuss.

WebTV's Discuss newsreader displays all posts in each group up to 10 days after the posting date, up to 1000 posts. The posts are grouped by thread, with the most recently updated thread moving to the first of the ten possible pages of 100; original posts that haven't been replied to first appear at the top of page 1-100.

There are two main "kinds" of newsgroups available through WebTV: the WebTV-only groups (webtv.users and the alt.discuss groups), and the Usenet newsgroups (which are available from anywhere in the world from any computer with Internet access).

WebTV-only Newsgroups

There are two main kinds of newsgroups available only to WebTV subscribers: the moderated group, webtv.users (run by WebTV Networks, posts to this group are submitted, reviewed, and posted or not mostly based on their content and relevancy), and the unmoderated alt.discuss groups (although there are a couple moderated alt.discuss groups, handled by individual WebTV subscribers).

The main difference is speed and "freedom of speech": unmoderated groups get their posts up in minutes, moderated groups take anywhere from an hour to a several days because all the posts submitted are read before being posted; unmoderated groups are gardens of unlimited expression, with all that entails, nobody controls what appears there. The webtv.users group has a charter, which can be found here–scroll down that page to find it at or near the bottom.

Usenet

There are tens of thousands of newsgroups available through Discuss that are distributed throughout the world on Usenet. You can post to them through Discuss, you can search the posts through Deja News (the WebTV-only groups aren't searchable there).

There are rules in Usenet, it's advisable to read the posts in a particular group for a week or so to see how things run there, and read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) before posting (here's a link to a collection of Usenet FAQs). WebTV users are considered the greenest of newbies at the moment, so expect to be hazed a bit.

Click here for some links to some groups, and to more information about Usenet.

Posting Through Deja News

You can register for free to post to Usenet newsgroups through Deja News. There are several advantages to doing this:

You can use quoted-text edit to include the text of a post you're responding to. While reading a post at Deja News, go to the bottom of the screen, and click Reply–the entire content of the post will be displayed in editable form, for you to edit by deleting and inserting your own text.
You will be sent an e-mail after each post you submit, which will include information on cancelling your post should you later change your mind about what you wrote.
You can post through Deja News using any valid e-mail address you have. When you register, you can use a free Hotmail address for example, and that's the only address that will appear on your posts. This is handy since posting to Usenet can lead to unwanted commercial e-mail (known as spam), as well as unwanted personal e-mails (flames), this way they don't clog up your main e-mail accounts.

To register at Deja News, click here.

Posting Through E-Mail

It's possible to send posts to any newsgroup through e-mail, allowing you to forward things from a mailbox, or post from any e-mail address you have. To find out how it works, click here.

Newsgroups and HTML

With WebTV it's very easy to use HTML codes in e-mail and newsgroup posts. If you want to do that, there are some things you should be aware of.

If you're posting to regular Usenet newgroups, and you use HTML code in your signature, you're going to get yelled at a lot by computer users in the group you post to.

Almost all newsgroups in Usenet are specifically intended to be text-only, they have rules and FAQs for the groups stating this clearly.

One reason is for many people all the codes in your HTML signature show up as massive amounts of text codes, they don't work, they just take up space. And for some computer users, the HTML does work, and any graphics or sounds linked in the HTML codes make the post load very slowly.

To compare the loading speed with and without HTML, see how fast posts load webtv.users, then go to some of the WebTV-only groups in alt.discuss and click on some posts, watch the time it takes for the post to pop onscreen...and then see how many of the posts have little or nothing in them to make the wait worth it.

WebTV users have kind of used to the slowness of HTML posts loading, computer users aren't, and shouldn't have to be.

Back to the Main Page

...is brought to you by...

get your free homepage today