One big of the big parts of the Internet that some users aren't too familiar with is something called newsgroups. Perhaps you have seen a message somewhere referring you to wpi.ccc, or wpi.students. These are newsgroups, or message bases, and there are a whole lot of them out there. WPI receives many of the tens of thousands of newsgroups in existence, and in this article we hope to help you get started reading and posting messages in one of these.
To access the newsgroups, you first need to login to your Unix account, just like you were going to check your e-mail. Once you have logged in, the next step is to run a newsreader program. There are many of these programs available on the WPI computer system, and each has their own proponents. For this example, you will be using a program called tin. Many people also use pine, which we will also briefly touch on, and some use the programs gnus, trn, rn, or others. Try several, and see which one you find to be most useful.
If you have never read newsgroups before, you need to run the program active_groups. Just type active_groups at your Unix prompt, hit enter and follow the instructions that it gives you. When you are done, type tin at the prompt. You should now see your list of subscribed newsgroups. Since you ran active_groups, you will be subscribed to all of the WPI newsgroups. You can get help at any time in tin by pressing h.
To change the list so that it shows all available newsgroups, press y. You can then use the / key to search for newsgroups that interest you. The s and u keys will subscribe and unsubscribe you to newsgroups and pressing y again will show you only the newsgroups that you have subscribed to. If you know the name of the group you want to subscribe to, press S and then enter the group name.
Use the up and down arrows to select between newsgroups and press enter to read that group. Now, you should see a list of topics in that newsgroup and each topic will have one or more messages underneath it. Press return on a topic to read the messages.
While you are reading messages, you may have something to add. To reply via email to a message use r, and to post a followup message to the newsgroup, use the f key. Remember, if you want the message to appear in the newsgroup you need to followup, and not reply. By default, tin uses emacs as its message editor. Once you have entered in your message, press Control-x, Control-c to exit. Then save the file and press p to post it. If you want to practice posting messages, subscribe to wpi.test and try to post a message there. Test postings in other newsgroups are frowned upon by their readers.
The help section in tin, available by pressing h, is very useful. You can also read the manual pages by typing man tin at your Unix prompt. Reading news in pine is similar. To get to the newsgroups, press l on the main menu. Pine does not separate the messages into threads however, a feature which some find to be very useful. You may also want to try the programs trn, gnus, and rn. These are other newsreaders available to you, and if tin or pine don't suit your needs, one of these might.
There are several WPI based newsgroups that you may want to read. The group wpi.ccc has announcements concerning the computer systems at WPI, and wpi.students has postings of interest to the WPI student body. You can find the schedule for the Computer Center's training on wpi.ccc.training. There are newsgroups out there that cover almost any topic, so with a little looking you should be able to find something that interests you.
A few words on posting etiquette. Its pretty important that your posts to a newsgroup are on topic with that group. People will get pretty mad at you if you waste their time with off-topic posts. Also, there usually is no need to quote an entire message in your reply. Its good to include enough so that people know what you are talking about, but again, you don't want to waste time by forcing people to scroll through pages of text that they've already read.