Newsgroups
General Numbers
Currently, AICT carries about 45,000 news groups.
The news server processes on average 10 gig of news per day,
which translates to about half a million articles per day.
If you're really into statistics, you can read the last 60 days'
statistics at
http://news.srv.ualberta.ca
Retention Periods
There are different retention periods for different newsgroups.
For example, the ualberta.courses groups have a retention period of
one full semester. Other ualberta groups have a 62-day retention period.
The 'Big Eight' (comp, humanites, misc, news, rec, sci, soc,talk) and all
the rest are kept for varying amounts of time.
The reason for a non-specific time is that all the groups, other than
ualberta are stored in a Cyclic News File System.
That's a fancy way of saying "wrap-around." Once the space alloted for the
group fills up, the next article will start "over-writing" the first article
in the file system, deleting the oldest article in other words.
Newsgroup creation
All ualberta newsgroup creation is by request.
Mail your request to news@news.srv.ualberta.ca.
All other newsgroup creation is accomplished automatically by allowed
group creators using PGP-signed control messages.
There is one exception to that rule, and that is for the "alt" groups.
No alt groups are automatically created, and are by request only.
This prevents the proliferation of empty, or spam-filled, or "ridiculous"
groups.
News server address
You should point your news reader application to
news.srv.ualberta.ca
News reader applications
TIN and NN setup and use are eloquently described in the GPU Lynx menu
on the 'News readers' link.
To set up MS Outlook Express to read news:
1) On the main window after opening MSOE, click on 'Set up News Account'
2) Follow the Wizard prompts.
You will be asked for name, email address, and name of the news server,
which is news.srv.ualberta.ca
3) Double-click on news.srv.ualberta.ca in the left hand window where your
mailboxes are.
4) MSOE will present you with all the newsgroups.
5) In order to read newsgroups, you must be subscribed, so scan through the
newsgroups until you see ones you want to subscribe to, then either
double-click on the group name, or click the 'Subscribe' box with the
newsgroup name that you want to join, highlighted.
6) Once you have subscribed to several or many, you can now double-click on
the group name. This will open up the group, and present you with the actual
articles. Double-clicking the article name opens the article.
Once MSOE has been set up to read news, the next time you open MSOE, the
'Read News' link will appear on the opening MSOE window. Just click that
link and all your subscribed groups will appear in the left hand window,
much like one of your mailboxes.
To set up Netscape to read news:
If you are using Netscape, the one-time setup for news reading is to
follow the drag-down menu items
Edit: Preferences: Mail&Newsgroups: Newsgroup Servers
click the Add button
enter news.srv.ualberta.ca
OK
Once this has been set up, the next time you want to read news
from your browser, enter the URL (and then bookmark it)
news:news.srv.ualberta.ca