| Ongoing
discussions that are spread around by email among
people on the Internet who share a common interest.
A newsgroup
is a discussion about a particular subject
consisting of notes written to a central Internet
site and redistributed through Usenet, a worldwide
network of news discussion groups. Usenet uses the
Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP).
Newsgroups
are organized into subject hierarchies, with the
first few letters of the newsgroup name indicating
the major subject category and sub-categories
represented by a subtopic name. Many subjects have
multiple levels of subtopics. Some major subject
categories are: news, rec (recreation), soc
(society), sci (science), comp (computers), and so
forth (there are many more). Users can post to
existing newsgroups, respond to previous posts, and
create new newsgroups.
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