Newsgroups

A newsgroup is an internet resource that people with similar ideas and interests can use to share information. You might consider it a type of electronic bulletin board. You can read as many messages as you care to read, and even respond to other subscribers with messages of your own. If you have a hobby or interest that you'd like to confer with others about, newsgroups are a good place to start. There is a newsgroup for nearly every hobby under the sun.

This document outlines the steps you would take to subscribe to a newsgroup using your grove account. Some people prefer to configure Netscape or Outlook Express to read news. The advantage to accessing the news server through grove is that it's already configured. Reading and posting news can be done immediately. Netscape, on the other hand, is a little more difficult to configure. However, the advantage of using Netscape is that it presents a more user-friendly graphical interface. You may use whichever reader you prefer.

Reading News

1. Log onto your grove account.

2. At the prompt, type pine and press the return key.
   The first time you use pine, you will see a message about what pine is and some other info about pine itself. Just hit return (enter) a time or two.

3. The screen should look like this:

   

4. Press L to get to the folders list.

5. Use the down arrow to highlight News on news.ufl.edu/nntp. Press the return key.

6. Your screen should look like this:

   

   This is the selection screen. This screen displays the newsgroups to which you are currently subscribed. Since you are not currently subscribed to any newsgroups, the screen is empty.

7. Type A to add a newsgroup. Pine should prompt you for a newsgroup name. Type in a single word topic that interests you, and pine will display a short list of all the newsgroups which contain that word in the title. If you type "travel", for example, the server will list all of the group names which contain "travel".

8. If you typed in travel at the prompt, your screen should look something like this:
   (it is possible that more groups have been added since we wrote this)

   

9. This is a list of all news groups which contain the word "travel". Navigate this list using the up and down arrows (for line by line traversal), the - (minus) key and the spacebar (to jump to the previous page or the next page, respectively). You can also type ^W (hold down the control key, and press W), and pine will search this list for whatever word or phrase you designate. Scroll down until you find a newsgroup that interests you. Highlight that newsgroup (using the arrow keys) and then press the return key.

10. Pine will ask you to verify the name again. Just press the return key, and pine will return you to the selection screen. The selection screen shows that you currently subscribe to one newsgroup.

11. Notice that your newsgroup name is highlighted. Press the return key.

12. This is the message selection menu:

    

    The (0) shows that these first messages have been deleted. The number inside the () is the length of the message in characters. 0 length means that the message is gone (after a while the server deletes old messages). Your screen may or may not look like this.

13. We want to find some non-deleted messages. The highlighted text near the bottom of the page should tell you how many messages are available. Press j to jump to one of the latter messages. When it asks you what message number you wish to jump to, type in a message number, and press the return key. The higher numbers are less likely to have been deleted.

14. The screen should be a little more active now (if it's not, try jumping to an even later message, or subscribing to a different newsgroup). Again, use the arrow keys, the - (minus) key, and the spacebar to navigate this list. Some newsgroups have very little content, others may have 10s of thousands of messages.

    

    Highlight a message topic that interests you, and press the return key.

    

15. From this menu, you can scroll through the message (again, using the arrow keys), view attachments, or even post a reply. To return to the message selection window, simply press the < key. For those of you who have used pine for email, this is very similar to the read email screen.

16. To return to the newsgroup selection screen, press the < key again.

17. To add any additional newsgroups, simply repeat the above steps (press A, type in the newsgroup's name, etc). To view messages from a specific newsgroup, again, use the arrow keys.

    
    a longer, happier newsgroup list . . .

18. When you are finished reading the news, press Q to exit pine.