Wanna improve the traffic quality of your site? Maybe you can use a newsgroups. Network news or Newsgroups are the equivalent of a public bulletin board. Anybody can put a message on the bulletin board and anyone who is interested can then view that message together with all the replies. Rather than just one bulletin board, network news provides thousands of news groups, each dedicated to a different topic. New newsgroups are created every day and many fall into disuse after a few days or weeks.
The majority of newsgroups are based on the following main categories:
- comp computer related topics
- news information about newsgroups and software
- rec recreational software
- sci science research and application
- soc society and politics
- alt alternate topics
- de, fr, uk German, French, UK and many other national interest groups
News messages are very similar to email messages, but they have some additional features. These allow messages to be associated into conversations or ‘threads’, so that it is possible to follow all the responses in sequence back to an original posting. You should be aware that newsgroups are often places where some very odd people carry on conversations on some strange and often undesirable topics. The morals of this are outside the scope of this book, but you may encounter material you wish you hadn’t if you choose to read the alt groups. You may also find that this happens occasionally in other newsgroups as well.
Most people simply read newsgroups, but obviously you can contribute as well. You need newsreader software to read and contribute messages. There are many of these available and most versions of Windows ship with Outlook Express, which has some simple news reading capabilities.
A final caution before we put newsgroups into action. If you choose to participate in a newsgroup by contributing messages, you may find that you start to receive a lot of unwanted email (Spam). This is because you are essentially advertising your email address to the whole world when you ‘post’ such a message.
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