What is a Usenet newsgroup?

Your first question may be "what is Usenet?".  A general overview of this topic can be found in news.announce.newusers. Search for "What is Usenet" and "What is Usenet? A second opinion".

[The most recent version of this document is posted periodically in the *.answers newsgroups, including news.answers, and in news.announce.newusers. It can also obtained by anonymous FTP as ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/news-answers/introduction. If you do not have access to anonymous FTP, you can retrieve it by sending email to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the command "send faqs/news-answers/introduction" in the message.]

A newsgroup is a group or forum on our news server, named "news.ucdavis.edu", where articles pertaining to a given topic are stored for a period of time.  Users start a newsreader, such as Tin, or other programs on a  Mac or PC). It is similar to a mailing list in that each user must  subscribe to the news group and that it is used for disseminating  information. Here are some of the advantages and disavantages of news groups:

• Each posted article is equivalent to one file on the news server. This is a much more efficient method of utilizing computing resources. A mailing list on the other hand creates a copy of each mail message for each person subscribed to the list.
• Articles posted to the server remain on the server for several  days (in the case of class news groups, a whole quarter). This means that users can always subscribe to a group at a later date and read articles that have previously been posted. In the case of a mailing list, a user that is not subscribed when a mail message is sent has no means of retrieving that mail message if he/she decides to subscribe at a later date.
• Newsreaders allow you to follow 'threads' of conversations. This means that all items related to a particular topic are presented together. Threading makes it very easy to follow discussions in newsgroups.

Is a newsgroup right for you?

There are a couple of different reasons you might want to create a newsgroup.

• To distribute class information or provide a forum for class  discussion.
• To distribute information to the campus regarding you  organization/department or provide a forum for discussing related topics.

A newsgroups allows a large number of people access to the information you wish to disseminate without them having to hear about and subscribe to  a mailing list. When new groups are created, they are added to a searchable list (from within any news reader), and often users find newsgroups by simply looking for what is available.

The threaded nature of the news readers allow you to easily follow discussions..

How to request a non-UCDavis newsgroup be added to our site.
We only carry newsgroups that we maintain or that are carried by the sites that we exchange newsgroups with. To find out if a newsgroup is carried by one of our sources please send email to usenet@ucdavis.edu with the complete name of the newsgroup and request that we check our sources and see if they carry the newsgroup. If they do then we will add that newsgroup to our site.