Department of Engineering

News

Introduction

News (or USENET news) is a worldwide system of discussion groups or newsgroups, used by tens of millions of people on the Internet and beyond. News articles contributed by readers are distributed around the world and can be read by anyone with a suitably connected system and newsreading software.

The University no longer provides a news server, or any local newsgroups, and instead provides a web forum at http://forum.cam.ac.uk - you will need to use your Raven password to log in.

Anyone wishing to retain access to Usenet newsgroups will have to look to external providers. Home ISPs may provide newsgroup access (e.g. VirginMedia- ex-NTL - ex-Cambridge Cable - does), Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/) provides a web interface, and Ian Jackson has offered free access to his chiark news server from computers on the University network (see http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~news/ucam.html). There are a variety of other sites offering newsgroup access, either free or at a price. The Computing Service cannot recommend any particular option.

Newsgroups and Netiquette

There are many thousands of international news groups, on all sorts of topics.

It's a good idea to read a newsgroup for a couple of weeks before starting to contribute to avoid getting "flamed" for bad "netiquette" - it's also a good idea to look at the newsgroup news.announce.newusers which tells you about the conventions used on newsgroups. Our Netiquette page provides more guidance.

Use Google groups to search newsgroup archives.

How to access newsgroups from CUED

There are many different newsreader programs which can be used to access newsgroups.

• If you run your own Linux machine you will probably find you can install text-based newsreaders like trn, nn, and slrn.
• The emacs text editor has a built-in newsreader called Gnus.
• There are graphical Linux newsreaders such as Pan, xrn and Knode.
• Some email programs or web browsers also offer news reading facilities: eg Pine, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird and Netscape.
• You can find a list of other suggestions, including for Windows, at http://www.newsreaders.info/recommended-newsreaders.htm

All of these programs let you choose the newsgroups that you want to read and send items to the newsgroups.

On the Teaching System we now recommend Pine for light use.

Pine

You may already use Pine on the Teaching System to read your email, but it is also possible to read and reply to news messages using Pine.

To set up Pine to for news you need to go to the (M)ain menu and then into (S)etup and (C)onfig. Near the top of the page is an option called nntp-server and to use the chiark news server you should set this to nnrp.chiark.greenend.org.uk and Exit the setup and commit the changes.

Pine should automatically have the correct mail settings for sending email replies, even if you don't usually use it to read your email.

Now when you (L)ist your folders you should also see a list of subscribed news groups. You can (A)dd new newsgroups, giving a partial name to search which ones are available. You can read and reply to messages exactly as if they were emails.