| For best results look through upsar::news-backbone and clovax::vnews.
Some notes on usenet culture:
For those of you who are unfamiliar, usenet is kind of like notes
with some exceptions.
The first is that it goes outside of the company. Be careful not
to appear to be a DEC spokesman. (not quite as important in
rec.bicycles as it is in comp.sys.dec)
Also, there is no centralized storage machanism. Usenet messages
percolate from one machine to the next, and can eat up
a lot of disk space in the process. Most sites purge articles
older than a week or two, so if you see something, save it.
In fact you will frequently see responses to questions that
haven't gotten to you yet. Sometimes someone asks a stupid question
and hundreds of people respond. Since it can take a few days
for messages to get everywhere.
In any case, it's best not to post anything until you've been reading
for a while. There are some topics that people are sick of, but still
come up every three weeks. (E.G. "no man" v.s. "no one" in rec.arts.trek)
The mechanics of getting usenet:
There are two ways of getting usenet. The first is to get an acount
on a Ultrix machine that actually receives usenet. That's what I do.
The second way is to use a news reader to read from another machine.
VNEWS and XRN are among the most popular. Look in upsar:: news-backbone
to find the nearest news machine. Look in clovax::vnews and ufp::xrn
for new reader programs.
The old "subscription" method is gone. It was killing the machine that
sent it out.
-Jeff Bell
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