Chat-Line.net
Title
Chat Line.net - Forum
Description
[Ever wish you could chat on a regular basis with people who share your interests? Ever wish you could argue on a regular basis with people who don't? Either way, you'll probably be interested in the Usenet, a worldwide network of more than 14,000 online forums (or newsgroups, as they're called). A Usenet newsgroup is an ongoing discussion that you can join -- and leave and come back to -- any time you like; you just read what's been posted, post your comment or response, and come back and see what others had to say. You don't even need an Internet connection to join a Usenet forum; online services, such as AOL and CompuServe, offer them too.
Usenet refers to the collection of newsgroups (sometimes called the Big Eight hierarchies) and a set of agreed-upon rules for distributing and maintaining them. Usenet newsgroups are arranged hierarchically first by the name of the group, followed by the name of the subgroups. Each name in the hierarchy is separated by a period. For example, the discussion group about rose gardening is rec.gardens.roses. This means the conversation is in the general grouping of rec. (which stands for recreation), and a subgroup of recreation called gardens. In this particular case, an additional subgroup of gardens has been created for roses. Each additional subgroup in a hierarchy defines how narrow or specialized the discussion topic is. It's not uncommon to find newsgroups with several subgroups.
Not all newsgroups are part of Usenet. For example, the newsgroups with a prefix of alt. are not part of the core Usenet newsgroups, although they may look just like Usenet newsgroups to the average user. Another example of a non-Usenet newsgroup is the Clarinet news feed, which is a commercial information service that also looks like any other newsgroup to the end-user.
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