Panix Help: Newsgroups

Netnews on Panix

Background
News on Panix: Nonlocal Groups; Local Groups
Panix policies re. news posting

Background

Netnews is a collection of discussion groups dating from the 1979. Contributions are public throughout the distribution range of any particular group. There is no central server or administrator. For more information about the background of the newsgroups, please see the Wikipedia article on the subject.

There are many newsgroups, divided into categories called "hierarchies" which are further subdivided into subhierarchies and into individual groups. The best known hierarchies are those of Usenet (comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, talk) and the Alternet (alt.). There are also geographical hierarchies (for items of primarily local interest), and binary groups.

Some groups are moderated: That is, there are individuals who have been designated to control what articles can actually appear in those groups.

News on Panix

Non-local groups

Panix carries groups in the Big Eight (that is, the standard Usenet hierarchies:
comp
humanities
misc
news
rec
sci
soc
talk
by default, as we receive the official notification of the group's creation. We add other groups at the request of our users.

The panix.* hierarchy

Additionally, Panix has its own hierarchy, the panix.* groups. These groups serve as a kind of community center. Users help each other out with issues ranging from debugging programs to finding competent shoe repair.

In addition to the staff-created newsgroups, there is a hierarchy of groups created by user request.