<messaging> One of Usenet's huge collection of topic groups
or fora. Usenet groups can be "unmoderated" (anyone can
post) or "moderated" (submissions are automatically directed
to a moderator, who edits or filters and then posts the
results). Some newsgroups have parallel mailing lists for
Internet people with no netnews access, with postings to the
group automatically propagated to the list and vice versa.
Some moderated groups (especially those which are actually
gatewayed Internet mailing lists) are distributed as
"digests", with groups of postings periodically collected
into a single large posting with an index.
Among the best-known are comp.lang.c (the C-language forum),
comp.arch (on computer architectures), comp.Unix.wizards (for
Unix wizards), rec.arts.sf-lovers (for science-fiction
fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political
discussions and flamage).
Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> is alleged to have said,
"Remember the good old days when you could read all the group
names in one day?" This gives a good idea of the growth and
size of Usenet.
