Selecting Newsgroups

The first thing to do when you want to read Usenet News is to select which newsgroup to read. This might seem obvious but there are actually three different method of selecting a newsgroup:

1. Click a link in Internet Explorer that launches Internet News and displays the message in a specific newsgroup. If you spend a lot of time in your web browser, this is an easy method of reading a newsgroup, but it won’t prove useful if you want to continue to keep up with the discussions in that group.
2. In Internet News, open the Newsgroups windows by clicking the Newsgroup (Windows) or open Newsgroups (Macintosh) buttons, select a newsgroup, and click the Go to button. As with the previous method, this is fine for scanning a newsgroup but works badly for regular reading.
3. Select a newsgroup to which you’ve subscribed from your Newsgroup or Favorite Newsgroup drop-down menu. If you want to read a newsgroup regularly, this is the way to go.

But how do you go about subscribing to a newsgroup? God question, and let’s look at that now because although it isn’t something you’ll do often, you should do it when you’re getting started with Internet News.

When you first launch Internet News, it doesn’t know which newsgroups Yahoo Service carries. The first task is to make sure your copy of Internet News knows about all the Newsgroups Yahoo service carries.

1. Make sure internet News is running. As a shortcut, if you have the Windows version of Internet Explorer running, you can either select Read News from the Go menu r from the Mail drop-down menu from the toolbars. In the Macintosh version, click the news button on Internet Explorer’s toolbar.
2. Click the Newsgroup or Open Newsgroup button in the toolbar of the main Internet News window to display the Newsgroups window.
3. If the list if empty (click the All tab in the Windows version or the Show All Newsgroup button in the Mac version), click Reset List if you use the Windows version of Internet Explorer. If you use the Macintosh version, from the new menu choose Download Complete Newsgroup List. Either way, Internet news downloads the list of the many thousands of newsgroups that Yahoo Service carries. It may take several minutes to download the complete list, so be patient. Once the list is downloaded, Internet News displays it in the Newsgroups window.

Once you’ve downloaded the complete list of newsgroups, the time has come to pick a few to which you want to subscribe. You can either scroll through the entire massive list, which could take several years of careful study, or you can use a neat feature built into Internet News. If you have an idea of part of the name of a newsgroup, type it in the Display newsgroups which contain field. As you type, Internet News gradually reduces the list to just those newsgroups whose names contain the characters you’ve typed.