News

Introduction to News

News or USENET is a conference system used to distribute information, ask/answer questions and is not directly related to news as we would hear on the radio or read in the papers. It's pretty similar to a Bulletin Board System, only that USENET reaches a far wider audience..

News is organized into groups that concern specific areas of interest. These groups are called newsgroups and is divided into hierarchies. The groups can be viewed like a bulletin board, where written is visible on the board. Everyone can attach messages to this board, except some groups that are moderated (a moderator must approve the message first).

Examples on subjects for the groups can be everything from baking (rec.food.baking) to jokes (en.jokes) or the text editor FrameMaker (comp.text.frame).

On NTNU's local news server news.ntnu.no there are close to 7.000 different groups, and daily we receive around 130.000 posts to these groups. With this many groups it's impossible to get an overview, and you end up just subscribing to a few.

If you wish to use this service it is strongly recommended that you read the netiquette with written and unwritten rules.

news.ntnu.no is NTNU's news server. If you are going to configure a program using news, nntp or similar, that is the address you should use.