Long before the fancy browsers appeared to make the internet user friendly to everyone, university geeks were emailing, FTPing, IRCing and Usenetting well before the corporates recognised the power of the internet and started writing tcp/ip applications for all sorts of weird and wacky things!!!
Usenet was the way to form online communities long before chat rooms and instant messaging. It's full of thousands of online communities about practically every single subject known to man! - and you know what??? It's still out there! But be warned though, this is the "black market" of the net. This is where illegal software and VERY dodgy stuff goes on.
But in amongst all of the rubbish are great newsgroups for talking to like minded citizens and sharing lots of creative ideas! Once you've got involved in a few "hearty" discussions about politics and religion, found the name of that old Jackie Chan film you were looking for and grabbed Christmas clip art until it's coming out of your ears, there's always a place in your heart for Usenet!
To access usenet or nntp servers you'll need an nntp news reader (not to be confused with RSS news readers - but more on those later on). Here are a couple of good freeware newsreaders to use and some links to discover open nntp servers (servers that don't charge access). Your local ISP provider should have a local nntp server for you to access as well - check out your ISP's homepage.
Microplanet Gravity News Reader is a full featured Windows Usenet online/offline news client with an extensive feature list. Gravity has been a popular news reader since 1996. Numerous features were added over the years. Gravity originally started as shareware, and later as freeware. It is now open source under the BSD license.
Xnews is a general-purpose reader. Although it handles binaries quite nicely, it's not a binary grabber or picture viewer. Also, Xnews is an on-line reader. It has pseudo offline features such as header storage, but if you need true off-line capabilities, use Gravity, or something else.
A handy little app to use with Xnews is Funduc's Decode Shell Extension. If you find that you have missing binaries within your Xnews download folder, then browse to the applicable folder via Windows Explorer, right-click on the Xnews folder file and select Decode from the menu. Decode Shell Extension supports multiple attachments, multi-part files (already concatenated), Base64(MIME), yEnc, BinHex (Mac format), quoted-printable, plain text, XXENCODED, and User (table) encoded files.
To find open nntp servers check out:
DISENTER
FREE USENET NEWS SERVERS
Also take a look at Google Groups to "Create, search, and browse newsgroups" if you want to use your browser instead of a news reader.
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