News Servers
Groups
News servers cannot be explained without first explaining a newsgroup. A newsgroup is a collection of writings that anybody can read through. There are thousands of these collections, each being a separate group. Anybody who wants to can add to the collection of writings, for others to see and possibly respond to. People that are interested in a given group will often subscribe to it so that they know when new material has been added, much like one would subscribe to a mailing list, newspaper, or magazine.
If you are interested in a topic, chances are you can find a news group about it, from canceled TV shows to botany. If you enjoy cars, you can find a group discussing cars. You will find people from all walks of life whose experiences may help you. You can find very specific groups, such as people who are not just interested in any kind of car, but are specifically interested in late model Fiat automobiles. If you have an interest chances are that there is a news group where people are already discussing your favorite topic.
Participation
Newsgroups are, first and foremost, groups of the people participating in them. For this reason, it is recommended that any new user spend time reading recent messages in a given group in order to become familiar with the social expectations of that group. What may be a perfectly reasonable message in one group may be scandalously taboo in another group. A typical example would be posting images or other binary files, a practice which is virtually forbidden in some groups but encouraged in others.
Due to the nature of how news servers interact with each other, newsgroup provide a measure of anonymity. Many newsreader programs use terminology like "joining" or "subscribing" then a user views a group, but these are somewhat misleading. There are no fees for subscribing to a group, and no central repository of who has been viewing them.
Servers
Newsgroups are not maintained on a single server, instead they are decentralized. The messages, or posts, in the newsgroups are replicated on news servers around the world. News servers provide the infrastructure allowing this communication to take place. While a newsgroup may begin on a single server, it is often picked up by other servers. Each server will maintain a record of separate messages, sorted by the "groups" in which they were posted. Servers "peer" with each other, sharing their messages openly. By this peering mechanism, a message posted in Sri Lanka soon arrives at servers in Europe, North America, and elsewhere for all to see.
Sonic.net Server:
news.sonic.net
Hosted locally in Sonic.net's data center, news.sonic.net provides fast transfer rates, good text group retention and completion rates, and exclusive Sonic.net-only local groups. Text-only newsgroups can be accessed from outside of our network* by providing your login and password.
note:: For the purposes of newsgroup access and authentication, computers using a Sonic.net IP address have full access. Any connection through a provider other than Sonic.net, or connections utilizing the GlobalPOPs, O1, or PacWest dialup groups are considered to be outside of our network. Supernews.sonic.net and news.sonic.net are accessible when using NNTP authentication from such outside connections.
Sonic.net Newsgroups
Sonic.net provides some newsgroups for members only. These groups are, unless otherwise noted, only available on the news.sonic.net server. Below is a list of these newsgroups. In addition there are some newsgroups carried over from Santa Rosa Junior College, now on sonic.net for SRJC students who have lost dialin access to the campus, listed at the end.
Note: These links will open up your browser's news reader if it has one. If you do not have the correct information in your browser's configurations, you will get an error message. Please see Support Screen Shots for help setting up your browser. You may alternately use our Web Mail program to access the Sonic.net Exclusive groups listed below, by simply clicking the 'newsgroups' link at the top of the web mail program.
If you want to view these newsgroups with a different newreader, then you need to open up that reader and "Subscribe" to the groups you want.
Please refrain from posting MIME or HTML in the local Sonic.net newsgroups. Post in plain ASCII text. Your newsreader may have a preference setting for this options. Most newsreaders default to ASCII, so it's not likely that you will need to make any change to the settings.
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