How to Read the Network News Mark R Horton AT&T Bell Laboratories Columbus OH 43213 Revised by Rick Adams for 2-11 What is the Network News? USENET (Users' Network) is a bulletin board shared among many computer systems around the world. USENET is a logical net- work, sitting on top of several physical networks, including UUCP, BLICN, BERKNET, X.25, and the ARPANET. Sites on USENET in- clude many universities, private companies, and research organi- zations. Most of the members of USENET are either university computer science departments or part of AT&T. Currently, there are over 50,000 participants at over 2,000 USENET sites in the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Korea with more joining every day. Most are running the UNIX operating system. The network news, or simply netnews, is the set of programs that provide access to the news and transfer it from one machine to the next. Netnews was originally written at Duke University and has been modified extensively by the University of California at Berkeley and others. Netnews allows articles to be posted for limited or very wide distribution. This document contains a list of newsgroups that were active at the time the document was writ- ten. It exists to assist you in determining which newsgroups you may want to subscribe to. When creating a new article, the level of distribution can be controlled by use of the "Distribution" field. This will prevent notices of apartments for rent in New Jersey being broadcast to California (or even Europe). Any user can post an article, which will be sent out to the network to be read by persons interested in that topic. You can specify which topics are of interest to you by putting them in a subscription list. Then, whenever you ask to read news, the news reading program will present all unread articles of interest. There are also facilities for browsing through old news, posting follow-up articles, and sending direct electronic mail replies to the author of an article. UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T. How to Read the Network News This paper is a tutorial, aimed at the user who wants to read and possibly post news. The system administrator who must install the software should see the companion document USENET Version B Installation. Why USENET? USENET is useful in a number of ways. Someone wishing to announce a new program or product can reach a wide audience. A user can ask "Does anyone have an x?" and will usually get several responses within a day or two. Bug reports and their fixes can be made quickly available without the usual overhead of sending out mass mailings. Discussions involving many people at different locations can take place without having to get everyone together. Another facility with similar capabilities to netnews is the electronic mailing list. A mailing list is a collection of elec- tronic mailing addresses of users who are interested in a partic- ular topic. By sending electronic mail to the list, all users on the list receive a copy of the article. While the mailing list facility is quite useful, USENET offers a number of advantages not present in mailing lists. Getting yourself on a mailing list is not always easy. You have to figure out who maintains the list and ask them to put you on it. Often these people are out of town or busy, and don't put you on the list for several days. Sometimes you have to send mail to the entire mailing list, hop- ing that one of the readers will tell you who maintains the list. Once you are on the list, you often find yourself in the middle of a discussion. Netnews keeps old articles around until they expire (usually about two weeks) so you can browse through old news to catch up on what you missed. Similarly, referring to an old article is easy, without having to keep a personal file of all old mail to the list. Another advantage is appreciated by the other users of the system. There is less overhead in having only one copy of each message sent to each machine, rather than having separate copies sent to each of several users on the same machine. This cuts down on computer time to process the messages, and on-line costs for telephone calls to transfer messages from one machine to another (when phone lines are used). Another advantage is in the disk space consumed. When only one message is sent to each sys- tem, only one copy of the message is kept on disk. In a mailing list environment, each user has a copy in a mailbox. Of course, if the mailing list is small enough the overhead is less than an international newsgroup. How do I Read News? In the USENET jargon, interest topics are called newsgroups. A newsgroup list appears in a later section, current as this pa- per was written. You have your own subscription list of news- groups to which you are said to subscribe. The simplest way to read news is to type the command: readnews Other possibilities include: a full-screen-oriented news reading program, vnews(1), (described in the Appendix,) the notesfile system, which can also be used for news (described in a separate paper,) and rn, a very popular news reading program distributed separately from this package. Each newsgroup to which you sub- scribe will be presented, one article at a time. As each article is presented, you will be shown the header (containing the name of the author, the subject, and the length of the article) and you will be asked if you want more. There are a number of possi- ble choices you can make at this point. The three most common (y, n, and q) are suggested by the program. (To see a complete list of possible responses, type ? for help.) You can type y for "yes" (or simply hit ) and the rest of the message will be displayed. (If the message is long, it may stop before it runs off the top of the screen. Type or to see more of the message. Another choice you can make is n for "no". This means you are not interested in the message - it will not be offered to you again. A third option is q for "quit". This causes a record to be made of which articles you read (or refused) and you will exit netnews. When you have read all the news, this happens automatically. The q command is mainly useful if you are in a hurry and don't have time to read all the news right now. (Many users put a readnews(1) or checknews(1) command in their .profile or .login files so that they will see new news each time they log in.) If you are reading news for the first time, you may find yourself swamped by the volume of unread news, especially if the default subscription is all. Don't let this bother you. If you are getting newsgroups in which you have no interest, you can change your subscription list (see below). Also, bear in mind that what you see is probably at least two weeks' accumulation of news. If you want to just get rid of all old news and start anew, type readnews -K -n all which will throw away all old news, recording that you have seen it all. Or, you can use the K command to mark all articles in the current newsgroup as read. Once you catch up with (or ignore) all the old news, the news will come in daily at a more manageable rate. (If the daily rate is still too much you may wish to unsubscribe to some of the higher volume, less useful newsgroups.) Finally, note that while an article is printing, you can hit your interrupt character (usually or ), which will throw away the rest of the article. Among the other commands you can type after seeing the header of an article are: x Exit readnews. This is different from q in that the q command will update the record of which articles you have read, but x will pretend you never started readnews. N Go on to the next newsgroup. The remaining articles in the current newsgroup are considered unread, and will be offered to you again the next time you read news. s file The article is saved in a disk file with the given name. In practice, what usually happens is that an article is printed, and then readnews goes on to print the header of the next article before you get a chance to type anything. So you usually want to write out the previous message (the last one you have read in full); in this case, use the form s- filename. e Erase the memory of having seen this article. It will be offered to you again next time, as though you had never seen it. The variation e- (erase memory of the previously read article instead of the current article) is useful for checking follow-ups to see if anyone has already said what you wanted to say. r Reply to the author of the message. You will be placed in the editor, with a set of headers derived from the message you are replying to. Type in your message after the blank line. If you wish to edit the header list to add more recipients or send car- bon copies, for instance, you can edit the header lines. Anyone listed on a line beginning with "To" or "Cc" will receive a copy of your reply. Note that the path used to receive a piece of news may not be the fastest way to reply by mail. If speed is important and you know a faster way, edit it in place of what the reply command supplied. A mail command will then be started up, addressed to the persons listed in the header. You are then returned to readnews. The case r- is also useful to reply to the previous message. Another variation on this is rd- which puts you in $MAILER (or ____(1) by de- fault) to type in your reply directly. f Post a follow-up message to the same newsgroup. This posts an article on this newsgroup with the same title as the original article. Use common sense when posting follow-ups. (Read Matt Bishop's paper "How to use USENET Effectively" for extended discussion of when and when not to post -- many follow-up articles should have just been replies.) You will be placed in the editor. Enter your message and exit. The case f- is also useful to follow up the previous message. In each case, the editor you are placed in will be vi(1) unless you set EDITOR (in your environment) to some other editor. You should enter the text of the follow-up after the blank line. + The article is skipped for now. The next time you read news, you will be offered this article again. - Go back to the previous article. This toggles, so that two -'s get you the current article. b Back up one article in the current group. This is not necessarily the previous article. U Unsubscribe from this newsgroup. Your .newsrc(5) file will be edited to change the : for that news- group to an ! preventing you from being shown that newsgroup again. ? If you type any unrecognized command, a summary of valid commands will be printed. Changing your Subscription List If you take no special action you will subscribe to a de- fault subscription list. This default varies locally. To find out your local default, type readnews -s Typically this list will include all newsgroups ending in "gen- eral" or "announce", such as general, and news.announce. (As distributed, the default is general,all.announce. Another popu- lar default is all.) You can change this by creating a file in your home directory named .newsrc which contains as its first line a line of the form: options -n newsgroup,newsgroup,newsgroup ... If your lines get too long, you can continue them on subsequent lines by beginning those lines with a space. (The netnews system will put extra lines in this file to record which articles you have read. You should ignore these lines unless you want to edit them.) For example, if you are creating a subscription list for the first time, and have already read news, you will find some text already in your .newsrc file, recording which articles you have read. You should put your options line before the first line of the file.) Thus, options -n general,news.announce,comp.human-nets will subscribe to those three newsgroups. An ! can be used to exclude certain newsgroups and the word all can be used as a wild card, representing any newsgroup. You can also use all as a prefix or suffix to match a class of news- groups. For example, options -n all,!talk,!rec.humor,!all.unix will result in a subscription to all newsgroups except for "talk" group, jokes, and any UNIX information. The metacharacter . is like / to the shell, and all is like *. A simpler way to subscribe to news is to subscribe to all, and then use the U readnews command to unsubscribe to newsgroups you don't want to read. This way you will see new newsgroups that are created, get a chance to evaluate them, and then unsub- scribe to those that don't interest you. The order of the newsgroups in your .newsrc (after the op- tions line) is the order in which newsgroups will be shown. If you want something other than the default, move the lines around until you are satisfied with the order. Be careful to keep the options line as the first line in the file. Submitting Articles To submit a new news article type postnews First, it will ask you if this is a follow-up to an article. Answer yes or no. If yes, you really should have done an f from readnews, but it will try and figure out which article you are following up to. It will ask for the newsgroup in which you read the article and the article number. If you can't remember, go back to readnews and find out. It is important that discussions are kept together. It is very frustrating for someone to read a follow-up that says: "I agree. It's very dangerous to leave that program as distributed." and not have any idea what the poster was referring to. If you answer no, postnews(1) will ask you for the subject of the new article. This should be as informative as possible. For example, "'67 Porsche for sale in New Jersey" is much better than "Car for sale" or even "For sale". It will then ask which newsgroups you want the article posted in. If you are unsure, type ? instead of a specific newsgroup and it will show you the list of currently available groups. Then, you will be asked how far your article should be distributed. It is important to keep this as small as possible to accomplish the purpose of your arti- cle. Remember that many newsgroups are read in Europe, Australia, and Asia in addition to the United States and Canada. It does no good (to use the previous example) to post a "Car for sale in New Jersey" article with a distribution of world. There is almost no chance that a person in Sweden or Korea would be in- terested in buying your car (even if it is a Porsche). It is a waste of money and computer resources to transmit the article that far. For this specific case, the appropriate distribution would be nj or only in New Jersey. If there were no local dis- tribution available, at least it should be confined to usa. If you are unsure of the distributions available at your site, type ? instead of a distribution and you will receive a list of dis- tributions valid for your site. If the distribution is world, your article will be read (perhaps with disgust) by thousands of people around the world. Then you will be placed in the editor. Enter the text of your article, after the blank line, and exit the editor. The ar- ticle will be posted to the newsgroups specified. If you change your mind about the headers while you are still in the editor, you can edit them as well. Extra headers can also be added be- fore the blank line. Browsing through Old News There are a number of command line options to the readnews command to help you find an old article you want to see again. The -n newsgroups option restricts your search to certain news- groups. The -x option arranges to ignore the record of articles read, which is kept in your .newsrc file. This will cause all articles in all newsgroups to which you subscribe to be displayed, even those which you have already seen. It also causes readnews to not update the .newsrc file. The -a date op- tion asks for news received after the given date. Note that even with the -a option, only articles you have not already seen will be printed, unless you combine it with the -x option. (Articles are kept on file until they expire, typically after two weeks.) The -t keywords option restricts the query to articles mentioning one of the keywords in the title of the article. Thus, the com- mand readnews -n comp.unix -x -a last thursday -t setuid asks for all articles in newsgroup comp.unix since last Thursday about the setuid feature. (Be careful with the -t option. The above example will not find articles about "suid", nor will it find articles with no title or whose author did not use the word "setuid" in the title.) Other useful options include the -l option (which lists only the headers of articles - a useful form for browsing through lots of messages.) The -p option prints the messages without asking for any input; this is similar to some older news programs on many UNIX systems and is useful for directing output to a printer. The -r option produces articles in reverse order, from newest to oldest. User Interfaces The user interface of a program is the view it presents to the user, that is, what it prints and what it allows you to type. Readnews has options allowing you to use different user inter- faces. The interface described above is called the "msgs" inter- face because it mimics the style of the Berkeley msgs(1) program. (This program, in turn, mimics a program at MIT of the same name.) The key element of the msgs interface is that after printing the header, you are asked if you want the rest of the message. Another interface is available with the -c option. In this case, the entire message is printed, header and body, and you are prompted at the end of the message. The command options are the same as the msgs interface, but it is usually not necessary to use the - suffix on the r, s, or f commands. This interface is called the "/bin/mail" (pronounced "bin mail") interface, because it mimics the UNIX program of that name. A third interface is the Mail(1) (pronounced "cap mail") in- terface, available with the -M option. This invokes the Mail program directly, and allows you to read news with the same com- mands as you read mail. (This interface may not work on your system - it requires a special version of Mail with a -T option.) A fourth interface, is the MH news/mail program from Rand. That program can be used directly to read network news. A fifth interface, vnews, which works well on display termi- nals, is described in the Appendix. A sixth possibility is the notesfile system, described in a separate paper. It is also display-oriented. A seventh interface is rn. It is quite powerful and remin- iscent of the EMACS text editor. An eighth possibility is to use your favorite mail system as an interface. There are a number of different mail reading pro- grams, including /bin/mail(1), Mail, msg(1), and MH. Any mail system with an option to specify an alternative mailbox can be used to read news. For example, to use Mail without the -M op- tion, type readnews -c "Mail -f %" The shell command in quotes is invoked as a child of readnews. The -f option to Mail names the alternative mailbox. Readnews will put the news in a temporary file, and give the name of this file to the mailer in place of the %. There is an important difference when using this kind of interface. The mailers do not give any indication of which articles you read and which ones you skipped. Readnews will assume you read all the articles, even if you didn't, and mark them all read. By contrast, the -M option uses the -T option to Mail, asking Mail to tell Readnews which articles you read. Getting News when you Log In Most users like to be told when they first log in if there is any news. This way they are reminded of news, but are not in- terrupted by it during the day. If you log in once in the morn- ing, you can think of getting the news as reading the morning newspaper. It is common to put a checknews or readnews command in your .profile or .login file of commands that are executed when you log in. Since there might not be any news, and since the readnews command goes to a considerable amount of work to find all unread news (assuming you are going to read it), there is another com- mand, called checknews, which tells you if there is any news. The checknews command is smaller and faster than readmews, and was designed especially for a login file. There are also options to be silent if there is (or is not) news, and to start up read- news automatically if there is news. The options to checknews are: -y Print "There is news" if there is any unread news. -v If -y is also given, instead of printing "There is news", prints "News: newsgroup ..." giving the name of the first newsgroup containing unread news. If general is the first newsgroup presented, this can be used to tell users whether the unread news is important. -n Print "No news" if there is no unread news. -e If there is any unread news, start up readnews. Any additional arguments after the -e will be passed to readnews. Thus, checknews -yn tells you whether there is any unread news. checknews -e -M starts up readnews with the Mail interface if there is news, and otherwise does nothing. checknews -y tells you if there is news, and is silent if there is no news. Creating New Newsgroups New newsgroups are proposed by the users and created by site administrators. To create a newsgroup, first make sure this is the right thing to do. Normally a suggestion is first posted to news.groups,whatever.relatedgroup for a world wide newsgroup (whatever.relatedgroup should be the group which you are propos- ing to subdivide.) For example, to propose creating rec.arts.tv.soaps, post the original article to rec.arts.tv,news.groups). Followups are made to news.groups only. (You can force this by putting the line: Followup-To: news.groups in the headers of your original posting). If it is established that there is general interest in such a group, and a name is agreed on, then ask your local netnews administrator to create the newsgroup. (It can actually be created by any netnews ad- ministrator anywhere on the net, within the scope of the news- group.) Once the newsgroup is created and the first article has been posted, the newsgroup is available for all interested per- sons to post to. List of Newsgroups This section lists the newsgroups that are currently active. It is intended to help you decide what you want to subscribe to. Note that the list is constantly changing. Note also that this list only describes those groups available on a network-wide basis. Since not all installations choose to receive all news- groups, it is recommended that each installation edit the list of local newsgroups to be correct before distributing this document to their users. If this is not possible, a local appendix can be created. Local Local groups are kept on the current machine only. Local names can be identified by the lack of a prefix, that is, there are no periods in local newsgroup names. general News to be read by everyone on the local machine. For example: "The system will be down Monday morning for PM." Or, "A new version of program x has been in- stalled." This newsgroup is usually mandatory - you are required to subscribe to this newsgroup. (The list of mandatory newsgroups varies locally.) This require- ment assures that important announcements reach all users. (Formerly msgs.) Network Wide These are the groups as of the last editing of this manual. The list is undoubtably already out of date. A current list can be obtained by typing ? to the "Newsgroups? " prompt in post- news. comp.ai Artificial intelligence discussions. comp.ai.digest Arpanet Artificial Intelligence Digest. (Moderated) comp.arch Computer architecture. comp.bugs.2bsd Reports of UNIX* version 2BSD related bugs. comp.bugs.4bsd Reports of UNIX version 4BSD related bugs. comp.bugs.misc General bug reports and fixes. comp.bugs.sys5 Reports of AT&T System 5 (and System 3) related bugs. comp.cog-eng Cognitive engineering. comp.compilers Compiler construction, etc. (Moderated) comp.databases Database and data management issues and theory. comp.dcom.lans Local area network hardware and software. comp.dcom.modems Data communications hardware and software. comp.dcom.telecom Telecommunications digest. (Moderated) comp.doc Public-domain documentation. (Moderated) comp.doc.techreports Announcements and lists of technical reports.(Moderated) comp.edu Computer science education. comp.emacs EMACS editors of different flavors. comp.graphics Computer graphics, art, animation, image processing, comp.graphics.digest Arpanet Digest on Computer Graphics. (Moderated) comp.lang.ada The computer language Ada*. comp.lang.apl The computer language APL. comp.lang.c The computer language C. comp.lang.c++ The object-oriented computer language C++. comp.lang.forth The computer language Forth. comp.lang.fortran The computer language FORTRAN. comp.lang.lisp The computer language LISP. comp.lang.misc Other computer languages. comp.lang.modula2 The computer language Modula-2. comp.lang.pascal The computer language Pascal. comp.lang.prolog The computer language PROLOG. comp.lang.smalltalk The computer language Smalltalk 80. comp.laser-printers Laser printers, hardware and software. (Moderated) comp.lsi Large scale integrated circuits. comp.mail.headers Arpanet header-people mailnig list. comp.mail.maps Various maps, including UUCP maps. (Moderated) comp.mail.uucp Proposed uucp mail/network standards. comp.newprod Announcements of new products (Moderated) comp.org.decus DEC* Users' Society newsgroup. comp.org.usenix USENIX Association events and announcements. comp.os.cpm The CP/M operating system. comp.os.eunice The SRI Eunice system. comp.os.os9 The os9 operating system. (Moderated) comp.os.vms DEC's VMS Operating System(Moderated) comp.periphs Peripheral devices. comp.protocols File Transfer Protocol discussions.(Moderated) comp.protocols.appletalk Applebus hardware & software. (Moderated) comp.protocols.kermit Information about the Kermit package.(Moderated) comp.protocols.tcp-ip TCP and IP network protocols.(Moderated) comp.sources.bugs Bugs and fixes for comp.sources postings (Moderated) comp.sources.d Any discussion on comp.sources postings. comp.sources.games Postings of recreational software(Moderated) comp.sources.mac Public Domain Software for the Macintosh (Moderated) comp.sources.unix Public Domain Software for Unix systems (Moderated) comp.sources.wanted Requests for software, termcap entries, etc. comp.std.c C language standards(Moderated) comp.std.internat International standards comp.std.mumps The X11.1 committee on Mumps (Moderated) comp.std.unix The P1003 committee on UNIX (Moderated) comp.sys.amiga Commodore Amiga computers -- info, uses, no programs. comp.sys.apollo Apollo computer systems.(Moderated) comp.sys.apple Apple computers. comp.sys.atari.8bit 8 bit Atari computers. comp.sys.atari.st 16 bit Atari computers. comp.sys.att AT&T computers. comp.sys.cbm Commodore computers. comp.sys.dec DEC computers. comp.sys.hp Hewlett/Packard computers comp.sys.ibm.pc IBM personal computers. comp.sys.ibm.pc.digest Arpanet Digest on the IBM PC family.(Moderated) comp.sys.intel Intel computers. comp.sys.m6809 Motorola 6809's. comp.sys.m68k Motorola 68000, 68010, 68020 based computers comp.sys.m68k.digest Arpanet Digest on 68000-based systems.(Moderated) comp.sys.mac The Apple Macintosh & Lisa comp.sys.mac.digest Arpanet Digest on Apple Macintosh computers (Moderated) comp.sys.masscomp Masscomp computers.(Moderated) comp.sys.misc Other types of computers. comp.sys.nsc National Semiconductor Computers and chips. comp.sys.pyramid Pyramid 90x computers.(Moderated) comp.sys.ridge Ridge 32 computers and ROS.(Moderated) comp.sys.sequent Sequent systems, (esp. Balance 8000).(Moderated) comp.sys.sun Sun "workstation" computers(Moderated) comp.sys.tandy Tandy/Radio Shack computers comp.sys.ti Texas Instruments computers. comp.sys.workstations Various workstation-type computers.(Moderated) comp.terminals All sorts of terminals. comp.text Text processing. comp.unix UNIX* features and bugs.(Moderated) comp.unix.questions General questions on UNIX. comp.unix.wizards Expert discussions, bug reports, and fixes for UNIX. misc.consumers Consumer interests, product reviews, etc. misc.consumers.house Owning and maintaining a house. misc.invest Investments and the handling of money. misc.jobs Job announcements, requests, etc. misc.kids Children, their behavior and activities. misc.legal Legalities and the ethics of law. misc.misc Various discussions too short-lived for other groups. misc.psi ESP,PSI, etc (Moderated) misc.taxes Tax laws and advice. misc.test Testing of network software. Very boring. misc.wanted Requests for things that are needed. news.announce General announcements of interest to all. (Moderated) news.announce.conferences Upcoming conferences (Moderated) news.announce.newusers Explanatory postings for new users. (Moderated) news.config Postings of system down times and interruptions. news.groups Discussions and lists of newsgroups news.lists News-related statistics and lists(Moderated) news.misc Discussions of USENET itself. news.newsites Postings of new site announcements. news.software.b B news software. news.software.notes Notesfile software from the Univ. of Illinois. news.stargate Satellite transmission of news. news.sysadmin Comments directed to system administrators. rec.arts.books Books of all genres, shapes, and sizes. rec.arts.comics The funnies, old and new. rec.arts.drwho Dr. Who. rec.arts.misc Other arts related topics. rec.arts.movies Reviews and discussions of movies. rec.arts.poems Poetry. rec.arts.sf-lovers Science fiction lovers' newsgroup. rec.arts.startrek Star Trek, the TV show and the movies. rec.arts.tv The boob tube, its history, and past and current shows. rec.arts.tv.soaps Postings about TV soap operas. rec.audio High fidelity audio. rec.autos Automobiles, automotive products and laws. rec.autos.tech Technical aspects of automobiles, et. al. rec.aviation Aviation rules, means, and methods. rec.bicycles Bicycles, related products and laws. rec.birds Hobbyists interested in bird watching. rec.boats Hobbyists interested in boating. rec.food.cooking Food, cooking, cookbooks, and recipes. rec.food.drink Wines and spirits. rec.food.recipes A "distributed cookbook" of recipes.(Moderated) rec.food.veg Vegetarians. rec.games.board Board games. rec.games.bridge Hobbyists interested in bridge. rec.games.chess Chess & computer chess. rec.games.empire The computer game Empire. rec.games.frp Fantasy Role Playing games. rec.games.go Go. rec.games.hack The computer game Hack. rec.games.misc Other games and computer games. rec.games.pbm Play by Mail games. rec.games.rogue The computer game Rogue. rec.games.trivia Trivia. rec.games.video Video games. rec.gardens Gardening, methods and results. rec.guns Firearms(Moderated) rec.ham-radio Amateur Radio practices, contests, events, rules, etc. rec.ham-radio.packet Packet radio setups. rec.humor Jokes and the like. May be somewhat offensive. rec.humor.d The content of net.jokes articles rec.mag Magazine summaries, tables of contents, etc. rec.mag.otherrealms A science fiction and fantasy "magazine". (Moderated) rec.motorcycles Motorcycles and related products and laws. rec.music Reviews and discussion of things musical (Moderated) rec.music.classical Classical music. rec.music.folk Folks discussing folk music of various sorts rec.music.gaffa Kate Bush lovers. (Moderated) rec.music.gdead A group for (Grateful) Dead-heads rec.music.misc Other music related topics. rec.music.synth Synthesizers and computer music rec.nude Hobbyists interested in naturist/nudist activities. rec.pets Pets, pet care, and household animals in general. rec.photo Hobbyists interested in photography. rec.puzzles Puzzles, problems, and quizzes. rec.railroad Real and model train fans' newsgroup. rec.scuba Hobbyists interested in SCUBA diving. rec.skiing Hobbyists interested in skiing. rec.sport.baseball Professional baseball. rec.sport.basketball Professional basketball. rec.sport.football Professional football. rec.sport.hockey Professional hockey. rec.sport.misc Other spectator sports. rec.travel Traveling all over the world. rec.video Video and video components. rec.woodworking Hobbyists interested in woodworking. sci.astro Astronomy discussions and information. sci.bio Biology and related sciences. sci.crypt Different methods of data en/decryption. sci.electronics Electronic design developments, ideas, and components. sci.lang Natural languages. sci.math Mathematical discussions and puzzles. sci.math.stat Statistics discussion. sci.math.symbolic Symbolic algebra discussion. sci.med Medicine and its related products and regulations. sci.misc General purpose scientific discussions. sci.physics Physical laws, properties, etc. sci.research Research and computer research. sci.space Space, space programs, space related research, etc. sci.space.shuttle The space shuttle and the STS program. soc.college College, college activities, campus life, etc. soc.comp Computers and Society (Moderated) soc.culture.african Africa & things African soc.culture.celtic Celtics culture. soc.culture.greek Greeks culture. soc.culture.indian India & things Indian soc.culture.jewish Information and discussion about Judaism. soc.human-nets Computer aided communications digest.(Moderated) soc.misc Other Social topics soc.motss Issues pertaining to homosexuality. soc.net-people Announcements, requests, etc. about people on the net. soc.risks Risks to the public from computers (Moderated) soc.roots Genealogical matters. soc.singles Newsgroup for single people, their activities, etc. soc.women Women's rights, discrimination, etc. talk.abortion Abortion. talk.philosophy Philosophical discussions (Moderated) talk.philosophy.misc Philosophical discussions. talk.philosophy.tech Philosphy and technology (Moderated) talk.politics Political problems, systems, solutions. (Moderated) talk.politics.arms-d Arms discussion digest.(Moderated) talk.politics.misc Political discussions. Could get hot. talk.politics.theory Theory of politics and political systems. talk.religion.christian The form and nature of Christianity (Moderated) talk.religion.misc Religious, ethical, and moral implications of actions. talk.rumors For the posting of rumors. Appendix - How to use vnews Overview Vnews is a program for reading USENET news. It is based on readnews but has a CRT-oriented (full screen) user interface. The command line options are identical. The list of available commands is quite similar, although since vnews is a visual in- terface, most vnews commands do not have to be terminated by a newline. Vnews uses all but the last two lines of the screen to display the current article. The next to the last line is the secondary prompt line, and is used to input string arguments to commands. The last line contains several fields. The first field is the prompt field. If vnews is at the end of an article, the prompt is "next?"; otherwise the prompt is "more?". The second field is the newsgroup field, which displays the current newsgroup, the number of the current article, and the number of the last article in the newsgroup. The third field contains the current time, and the last field contains the word "mail" if you have mail. When you receive new mail, the bell on the terminal is rung and the word "MAIL" appears in capital letters for 30 seconds. Commands Most of the readnews commands have vnews counterparts and vice versa. Some differences are: + It lacks a "digest" command (to deal specially with collections of articles bundled together). This would be nice to have, but it does not seem to be a major de- ficiency since you can move around in the digest with vnews commands. + To get to the previous group, use the N command with a - argument. + Vnews has commands for moving around in the article which readnews does not have since they aren't applica- ble. + It has a "parent" command which will go to the article that the current article is a follow-up to, and a "write" command that writes out the body of an article without the header. + You can refer to the current article from the shell or while writing a follow-up as $A. + The "decrypt" command (for decoding possibly offensive material) always does rot13 which seems to be the de- fault standard but the readnews version of it occasionally gets confused. Commands that differ from readnews Each vnews command may be preceded by a count. Some com- mands use the count; others ignore it. If count is omitted, it defaults to one. Some commands prompt for an argument on the second line from the bottom of the screen. Standard UNIX erase and kill processing is done on this argument. The argument is terminated by a return. An interrupt ( or ) gets you out of any partially entered command. A carriage return prints more of the current article, or goes on to the next article if you are at the end of the current article. A is equivalent to . Go backwards count pages. Go forward count pages. Go forwards half a page. Go backwards half a page. Go forwards count lines. Go backwards count lines. Redraw the screen. may be typed at any time. b Back up one article in the current group. l Redisplay the article after you have sent a follow-up or re- ply. n Move on to the next item in a digest. . is equivalent to n. This is convenient if your terminal has a keypad. p Show the parent article (the article that the current arti- cle is a follow-up to). This doesn't work if the current article was posted by A-news or notesfiles. To switch between the current and parent articles, use the - command. Unfortunately, if you use several p commands to trace the discussion back further, there is no command to return to the original level. ug Unsubscribe to the current group. This is a two character command to ensure that it is not typed accidentally and to leave room for other types of unsubscribes (e.g., unsub- scribe to discussion). v Print the current version of the news software. D Decrypts a joke. It only handles rotq3 jokes. The D com- mand is a toggle; typing another D re-encrypts the joke.