The
New Face of Usenet (Part II)
By Chris Clark |
 |
Welcome to another
installment of The New Face of Usenet! This time we look at three
more news groups that have recently sprung up.
Before you get into
the new three, you may want to take a look at the first three featured
news groups in "The New Face of Usenet (Part
I)" Otherwise, get ready for some circular logic and nonsensical
messages!
|
Each
News Group that we feature can be put into one of the following
categories:
|
|
|
 |
Binary
News Groups - These are groups designed to carry files. Their
enormous bandwidth requirements make them available only to the Seven
richest billionaires of the US. |
 |
Talk
News Groups - These are groups set up for the discussion of a
single topic. They are habitats to trolls, lamers, and mountains of
spam amid legitimate posters. |
 |
Moderated
News Groups - These groups do not post messages automatically,
but instead messages are read by customs officers from Kennedy International
Airport in case of contraband and then, maybe, are posted. |
 |
Other
News Groups - These are groups that don't fit in the other categories,
hence the need for this category. What'd you expect? A News Group
that reads your thoughts? Ha! |
|
*Please
Note! Some News Groups are subject to their fair share of cuss words.
In order to protect ears and feelings, we have replaced all cuss
words with names of fruits, in italic lettering.
|
#1 - alt.questions.notext
In
the world of Usenet messages, marking a message as having no text can
be done in many ways:
 And
so on. To accommodate people with short, quick, probably yes or no questions,
alt.questions.notext was born. The beauty of this group
is that you never need to download more than the message headers to see
full questions and answers!
#2 - talk.religion.fanatic.anti-usenet
This
group is a strange one that can be the central forum for fanatics from
any walk of life that think Usenet is evil.
Contrary to what most
believe about this group, the evils of the Internet are not addressed
at all. In fact, they are plain frowned upon. talk.religion.fanatic.anti-usenet
is the only news group on all of Usenet specifically for talking about
the evils of Usenet.
This News Group is
not only home to religious fanatics but any fanatics who think that people
who use Usenet are evil and/or Usenet and it's nature will bring on the
collapse of civilization. Despite those negative overtones, the people
who actually frequent this group are rather friendly and extremely tolerant
of all beliefs.
 Due
to some crazy and incredibly ludicrous positions stated on this News Group,
along with multiple encoded viruses, we have chosen not to display any
sample messages here. If you'd like to see what this News Group has to
offer, well, hey... it's your computer!
#3 - alt.post.off-topic
Let's
say you're a regular in a news group and while surfing the 'net you find
the funniest article you've ever read! You'd like to post it in your favorite
group for all to see, but you're concerned it's too far off topic. What
do you do?
Post it to alt.post.off.topic
of course! This group is designed solely for off topic posts. In fact,
since off topic is the topic, than anything off topic is on topic. That
means if you post off topic than your post is on topic and you're therefore
not on topic for a group set up for off topic posts.
Uh...
this just got really confusing. My brain hurts to much to keep going,
so that's all for now!
Yeesh...
We'll be back shortly
with three more of the hottest news groups on the usenet scene. So be
sure to watch the Syndicate for the next installment of The New Face
of Usenet. Don't miss out!
-Chris Clark
( click
here to email the author )
P.S.
- A big thanks goes out to Strider for providing inspiration for the first
article in this series, and therefore the entire series!
|
