In this section we will tell you about Usenet. It is one of the oldest Internet services – as well as E-mail. To cut the long story short, it’s a system of news-servers, united into a net. This system is usually called ‘News’ – that is why the servers are called news-servers. The system’s functioning is very simple: there are lots of so-called conferences and news-groups, each of them covering some particular area – reflected in its Subject. In such conferences you can read messages left by other people or compose your own. Each conference has its book of rules – and a person watching them obeyed; he is Moderator. All the conferences may be divided into two main groups: pre-moderated and post-moderated. In the former, you first send your message to the moderator, and he decides whether he will publish it, or not. And in the latter, you publish your message at once, all the people read it, together with the moderator, and if he considers your message not to the point, he will delete it.
Usenet is an international matter, so the official language is English. Of course, the conferences are not for text messages only; there are many ways of transferring other kinds of files – mainly pictures and sounds. There are special conferences oriented on this kind of activity – usually the Subject of such ones contains the word ‘binaries’; you’ll get nothing but pictures there. So far so good, but at present Usenet is in agony caused by a great quantity of spam. That is why we do not recommend you to write your E-mail address, because soon it will be piled with all sorts of ads.
Now it’s time to tell you how to use Usenet. You’ll need two things for that: a client program and the news-server address. Usually each provider has his own news-server, so you aren’t likely to have such problems. To tell more, there are a lot of free news-servers. As for the client: if you use Microsoft or Netscape products you must have one in your pack. But the thing is that these programs are rather primitive and inconvenient to use. That is why we’d like to recommend you a Forte product – Agent or Free Agent.
This is probably all you need to know about Usenet by now. Try – and the rest will come with practice, that makes perfect.