[Usenet] One of Usenet's huge collection of
topic groups or fora. Usenet groups can be
unmoderated (anyone can post) or
moderated (submissions are
automatically directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then posts
the results). Some newsgroups have parallel
mailing lists for Internet people with no netnews access, with postings
to the group automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some
moderated groups (especially those which are actually gatewayed Internet
mailing lists) are distributed as digests, with groups of postings periodically
collected into a single large posting with an index.
Among the best-known are comp.lang.c (the C-language forum),
comp.arch (on computer
architectures), comp.unix.wizards
(for Unix wizards), rec.arts.sf.written and siblings (for
science-fiction fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political
discussions and flamage).
