Ok, thank-you everybody for the information, but I’ve decided that I don’t like newsgroups very much. I spent a couple of hours wading through all the nonsense and I didn’t find much of anything that really piqued my attention. It really doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble.
On a side note, anybody know a good message board besides this one? The whole point of investigating newsgroups was to find another place to post, so I guess a new message board would be the best option.
PS I am in OpalCat’s Teeming Millions chatroom right now ( http://fathom.org/teemingmillions/chat.adp ), and I am not leaving until somebdoy else shows up!
First: newsgroups are discussions sort of like this, but not primarily web based. You can access them via the web, but that’s generally a really sucky way to do it. A newsreader works enourmously better.
Second, some of them are good, but probably 99% are total crap. It didn’t used to be like that though. Newsgroups predate the web by like 15 years or something like that, and they used to be pretty good until everybody and his uncle got access to the internet and started posting MMF.
It’s all a matter of finding the few good ones in the endless stream of crap. There are a few though; mostly moderated ones, but also some smallish unmoderated ones.
–
peas on earth
Cessandra - I’m glad you asked about newsgroups. I thought newsgroups were for specific topics. Months ago I was trying to subscribe to one on genealogy, but had trouble with it and gave up. I’ll have to check out the links offered here and try again.
Welcome Sycorax. Glad somebody is getting something out of this! 
Am I the only one around here that remembers being able to read all of USENet in a day? Come on people… I’m only 23… I don’t want to feel antiquated.
USENet used to be THE message board of the net. Or rather a collection of topic based message boards. It is where most of the true culture of the net started – not that anyone remembers it anymore. It used to be a very good place to go to talk about whatever subject you’re interested in, now it is the world’s largest collection of spam. There are still a few good groups left, but unmoderated nature makes getting information from USENet like getting a drink from a fire hose.
http://www.madpoet.com The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
All of Usenet in a day? I think you’d have to be older than 23 to remember that. Maybe your local newsfeed was very limited?
Well, I’m not sure exactly how much we had access to. A friend of mine long ago ran a Waffle BBS that gave access to usenet and email. At the time there were a hundred or two newsgroups. Also, remember this is in a day… as a sad, chubby little geek, I had lots of free time to do stuff like that.
http://www.madpoet.com
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
All I know is that my ISP doesn’t have misc.facts.straight-dope on their usenet lists. They do, however, have alt.fan.cecil-adams. I tried deja.com, but I really don’t like the way the messages are formatted. After repeated E-mails to my ISP, asking them to please add misc.facts.straight-dope to their lists, nothing as of yet has happened. So, for now, I’m staying away from Usenet until my ISP grows a brain and adds M.F.S.D to their list.
Shadowfox
“Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with
great ambitions.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
But picking up an earlier question of Cessandra’s, does anyone know of any other good message boards? I got into this one entirely by accident and I’m not really sure how to find any others
The bells of Hell go tingalingaling…
I don’t like the formatting of deja, either. www.Remarq.com is MUCH better. I totally recommend it.
I’m not sure how yours worked in particular, but many BBS’s only provided a very limited usenet feed.
This is just a wild-assed guess, but I’m thinking usenet was 200-300 total groups in maybe 81, 82, something in that ballpark - certainly it’s been bigger than that since the Great Renaming anyway.
–
peas on earth