Why use News Groups?

Updated: August 2, 2005

I've been using news group software since the University of Waterloo went on the Internet in the early 1980's.  News groups are my preferred way to make announcements and carry on discussions, including answering questions in a course or help desk setting.   This page explains why.

News groups generally fall into two categories: Announcement groups and Discussion groups.

Announcement news groups are generally one-way conduits of important information without discussion.  Some examples are:

• from professor to class
• from system administrators to campus
• from department chairs to faculty
• from student union to students
• from personnel office to employees

In the absence of a news server, announcements are often made by EMail.  EMail is handy, since professors don't have to wait until a lecture to make an announcement.   This is especially important if neither labs nor lectures have mandatory attendance; without a news group server, the only way to reach everyone may be via EMail.

News groups have some advantages over EMail for making announcements:

• Nobody can claim they didn't get your announcement because their mailbox was full or because their account wasn't working the day you sent out the announcement EMail.   This is especially important for newcomers to Algonquin (students or faculty), where EMail accounts may take weeks to be set up.  It is also important for people who are using unsupported mail servers that may not always be available.
• Students joining a course late still get to see all the announcements that you posted; you don't have to go back and EMail them the ones they missed.  New employees get to read the announcements posted prior to their starting work at Algonquin.
• The announcements can't be accidentally deleted from a mailbox before being read.
• Users can choose which announcement news groups they read.  You can elect to read the "urgent system announcements" news group every day, and not read the "general social announcements" news group until you have some free time.   Contrast this to your mailbox, where you have to read everything that comes into it.
• People making announcements will never get a request such as: "Please send that announcement again -- I lost it".  The announcements are always available on the news group server.
• Readers can configure the news reading software to show only the new announcements, not the ones already read.  However, all the announcements are always available if people want to review them.
• The announcements become part of the online, visible history of the course or topic area.  They are not "hidden" in mailboxes.  They are available to anyone interested in taking the course or reviewing the announcement history.  You can refer anyone to the news group.
• Announcements don't get overlooked in an active or big mailbox with many messages.
• Only one copy of the announcements get posted to the server, instead of flooding the mailboxes with dozens or hundreds of mailed copies.
• An incorrect or outdated announcement can be "pulled" the moment the error is discovered, or the moment the urgent situation passes.  A mailed announcement such as "system will be down on Monday" is simply annoying junk mail when read on Tuesday.  Outdated announcements can be cancelled; they won't even be seen by people after being removed from the server.
• The DNews news group server offers a full-text search of all Algonquin news articles.

In contrast to announce-only news groups, discussion news groups are multi-way, with many participants. Some examples are:

• course discussions
• general student chat
• help desk
• faculty discussions
• interest groups (e.g. the Linux operating system)

Again, discussion may be attempted using EMail technology such as one-to-one EMail, a mailing list, or a LISTSERV; however, news groups offer significant advantages.  Many of the advantages are already mentioned with regard to Announce-only news groups (above).  Other advantages are:

• All the messages articles are threaded and grouped by topic and/or by date.  You can read all of one topic before starting the next; you can easily ignore entire topics.   News reading software can group together all articles that are responses to other articles, no matter what Subject is used on each new article.  Some EMail software can only group messages by identical Subject title; if the Subject changes, EMail incorrectly treats the follow-on articles as a different discussion thread.
• In a help desk or course news group discussion, one publicly posted answer to a question is visible to all the readers of the news group instead of being of use only to the one person who sent you the question by EMail.  (I redirect all course questions to the course discussion news group and answer them there so that everyone benefits from the question and the answer, just as if the question had been posed in a live class setting.)
• Instead of one-to-one EMail, news groups offer the potential of real discussion.   The multiple posters and multiple readers build a community of learning, and the discussion history is immediately available to anyone who joins.  EMail discussion is invisible to "outsiders", and new members on the mailing list only see the new postings; they don't get to see any of the history.
• In a course or help desk news group, people often answer each other's questions without intervention from system staff or faculty.  Answers may come from people not "officially" required to be part of the discussion, e.g. a system administrator might answer a question posed in a course news group, and a faculty member might answer a question posed in a help desk news group.  Mailing lists are "closed" to this kind of community involvement.

Public dicussions conducted by private EMail have some problems:

• Some EMail software cannot automatically thread the messages and keep each follow-on message grouped with the message to which it is a response.  News software was designed from the start to thread and group news articles.
• I do not have room to keep the contextual message history for all the dozens of discussions in which I have an interest in my mailbox.  News servers keep the previous articles categorized, grouped, and stored for me.
• If a new person joins an EMail discussion list, I have to re-send and explain all the previous message history that was missed (unless the EMail list has a public archive).  With news groups, the discussion history is public and available on the server to anyone who wishes to join and get caught up.
• I want to be able to refer anyone to a discussion.  "Go see the Linux news group; it has the answer to your modem question."  "The answer to that was posted to the Compilers news group last May."  This referral process isn't possible with private mailing lists, since all the discussion is hidden in private mailboxes.
• Many discussions in which I participate are not "urgent" discussions.  I do not want to be bothered by hourly EMail from these discussions.  By using news software instead of EMail, the discussion messages are stored until I pick a time to go read them.  I reserve EMail for issues requiring a more immediate response.

I use EMail for urgent and/or private one-to-few communications.  Anything public involving more than one or two people I prefer to move to a news group.

Web Boards are web pages that attempt to behave like news groups and/or mailboxes.   They usually offer some of the advantages of news groups, such as message threading and public discussion.  Since the interface is your standard web browser, you don't have to learn any new software package.

The problems with Web Boards are these:

• Too many articles.  Most Web Boards don't have a way of suppressing articles that you have already read, so you always get all of the articles when you open the page.  News reading software can be configured to show you only the new postings that you have not read; this is much easier to manage.
• Poor display of heavily nested articles.  Most Web Boards don't display nicely articles that are follow-on's to follow-on's to follow-on's ... to follow-on's.  The indenting level becomes so severe that the page becomes unreadable.
• No text-only interface.  Some Web Boards don't create web pages that work in a text-only environment, such as you might run over a modem.  News servers store and move news articles as text, allowing reasonable use even over modem connections.
• No distribution of postings.  Most Web Boards cannot redistribute postings to other machines.  All news servers are designed to be able to exchange news articles with other machines, so your news posting can circulate as widely as you wish.
• No fetching of remote postings.  Most Web Boards cannot "receive" postings from another machine, so you cannot collaborate with users on other computers the way you can using news groups.