Microsoft Newsgroups: Frequently Asked Questions
Below are answers to frequently asked questions about Microsoft newsgroups and how to participate in them.
What Is a Newsgroup?
A newsgroup is a place online where people interact by posting and reading messages about topics that are of interest to them and the rest of a community.
What Are the Microsoft Newsgroups?
For a number of years, Microsoft has created the Microsoft.public newsgroup hierarchy and made it available to anyone on the Usenet. Thousands of Microsoft customers at all levels of expertise post in these groups today, creating the content, sharing information, and contributing ideas. A wide range of newsgroups is available, covering many Microsoft products, technologies, and topics.
Why Use the Microsoft Newsgroups?
Newsgroups are a valuable source of information. You can find out what your peers think, and get information from people who use the same products and technologies you use. Many people derive great satisfaction from helping others or sharing their points of view in the newsgroups.
How Do I Use the Microsoft Newsgroups?
Microsoft provides an HTML interface to make using newsgroups as easy as clicking on a Web page. The left side of the page provides a list of newsgroups and topics. After you select a newsgroup, you can check out interesting posts, search the newsgroup to find specific topics, answer a question, use subscription to be notified about new posts of interest, or post your own questions to the group.
Although the Web page interface is the easiest to use, these same newsgroups are also available at the msnews.microsoft.com NNTP server. You must use a client (see below) such as Microsoft® Outlook® Express to access the NNTP server directly in this manner.
Newsgroup terms
| • | Client. A tool used to read newsgroup posts. Outlook Express acts as a newsgroup client. HTML clients display newsgroup information on a Web page. |
| • | Cross-Post. Sending a single post to more than one newsgroup at the same time. |
| • | Hierarchy. A collection of newsgroups gathered together by broad topical or structural similarity, e.g. "Microsoft.public" groups related to Microsoft, and "alt" groups, which are managed and distributed differently from other hierarchies. |
| • | INN. "InterNetNews," the name of a specific Unix program that acts as a newsgroup server and speaks the NNTP protocol. |
| • | INS. "Internet News Service," the name of the Microsoft newsgroup server, a standard part of Microsoft Windows® 2000. |
| • | News. The generic name for the Usenet. |
| • | Newsgroup. A particular group within the Usenet. In October 2000, there were more than 100,000 newsgroups. Each newsgroup is named according to a hierarchical convention. Categories such as "rec," "comp," or "misc" identify the general subject of the newsgroup. Additional terms are sometimes added, uniquely defining the newsgroup within a collection of others. Examples: comp.lang.perl.misc, rec.pets.cats, Microsoft.public.access. |
| • | Newsgroup feed. The NNTP connection that enables newsgroup servers from different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to send posts to each other. |
| • | NNTP. "Network News Transport Protocol," the name of a protocol that controls the request and exchange of Usenet messages. |
| • | Post. An individual Usenet message. Also, the act of sending an individual Usenet message to a server that will display it in the newsgroup. |
| • | Server. A program that acts as a host for clients. Clients post and read from servers. |
| • | Spam. The "junk mail" posts and worse that are sometimes posted to the Usenet. |
| • | Thread. A collection of posts that reference each other. Threads are "trees"; they start with an initial post, then branch to all the posts that respond to it. Each response may be replied to as well. Threads may contain many branches and leaves, only a single branch, or none at all. |
| • | Usenet. The collection of all posts publicly distributed through NNTP. |
