newsgroup

n. [Usenet] 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.written and siblings (for science-fiction
fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political discussions and
flamage ).
