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Newsgoups have been under pressure for a while now. First it was the spammers,
MLMers, and flame warriors. Then came the more legitimate web based forums, mailing lists and chat.
But the usenet is not dead, not by a long shot.
A new breed of netizens armed with web-based news-readers are helping to keep the
newsgoups alive.
Web Based News Archives
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DejaNews
The king of the web-base news readers. Deja-News maintains
a searchable archive of postings in most of the newsgroups out there.
Provides a customised service that lets you find groups of interest
and to keep track of them.
Remarq.
- A New Kid On the Block, when compared to venerable old Deja News. But they are well worth
checking out.
In Reference
- They have been around for while. Though they provide
a wider range of services than dejanews it never caught on.
Probably because the site is so confusing. To add to the confusion
you must register with them before being allowed complete access
to their services.
Their biggest plus is allowing you to carry out searches by mail.
Mailling Lists
With megabites of spam eating away the usenet, mailing lists have
largely increased in importance. Most of the best mail lists on the internet
are free, meaning they do not charge a fee for subscription.
They make their income from one line or two line ads that apear at the end
of each mail.
Some lists send each and every post to all members of the list. Other present
them in the form of a digest. Postings are not charged for but are often moderated.
The Link Exchange Digest.
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Moderated by Adam Audette of
mmgco is packed with information on web publishing, banner
exchanges, search engine issues and any other
topic that may be of interest to
Link Exchange members.
You can subscribe to it by visiting the
LED website.
Netannounce
- A list that accepts all kinds of announcements, it need not even
be about a web site. They restrict commercial postings. So it is
highly unlike that you will recieve spam from this list.
I-search
- A mailing list for those facinated with the workings of Search engines.
The heavy metal mailing list.
- This is for rockers only. to subscribe send mail to axl@iglou.com
www.lizt.com
- Lizt maintains a large collection
of mailling lists. Both commercial and non commercial. Though it's no
fault of theirs some of the commercial lists I tried to subscribe to
have not sent me anything even one year later.
NNTP Servers
NNTP - Net News Tranfer Protocol servers are the old fashioned way of
reading news. Unfortunately many ISPs dont have an NNTP or restrict the number of groups their
server supports.
It is hard to find a server that provided access to all the newsgroups.
however by combining several NNTP servers it's possible to cover most of the usenet.
Until recently I was using 206.136.168.3 and
sdf.lonestar.org along with
news2.linkexchange.com for the
Link Exchange groups.
However both SDF and 206.136.168.3 started having
difficulties and then I switched to adenine.c.dna.affrc.go.jp,
however now I use Deja-news almost exclusively.
A very comprehensive list of NNTP servers can be found at
the internet zoo
rtfm
Read The %^$# Manual.
rtfm.mit.edu maintains, an
excellent archive of Usenet FAQs. These can be accessed by the use
of an anonymous FTP client. Or by using the rtfm mail-server.
To obtain a list of commands used with the mail-server send mail
to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu
with the word help in the body of the message.
Online Forums
Free of spam, accessible to anyone, and full of on-topic posts;
Online Forums are the biggest challenge to the newsgroups.
ForumOne maintains an extensive collection of
such online forums.
Also worth a mention is
Delphi Free forums
Delphi Forums Let You: Promote and
share your interests, meet like-minded people, Make discussions public or private and advertise events
It's often possible to find the archives of a specific maillist or
a newsgroup on the web, a few examples are netannounce, link exchange
digest, and the linux security archives.
Accessing these web sites is often easier and quicker than having to
sift through the muck on sites with less specific content.
Finaly there are two resources that monitors search engines and Newsgroups for you.
Both these will send an email message whenever a new page or post is available
under the topics being monitored.
- Informant
- Tracerlock
| Note: these pages were created in 1999 and have not been updated since. While some of the
content is still relevent you might want to visit raditha.com where you will find more upto date information and a wider collection of articles |
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