As I mentioned in my last article, Usenet can be a rich source of information. With well over thirty million people posting to the sixteen thousand or so newsgroups (discussion areas), someone out there is almost certain to have the facts, figures or opinions that you're after. However, Usenet has a reputation for unfriendliness. Talk of flame wars, spams, trolls, and mail bombs can be very off-putting. Also the constant media hype about fascist thugs and pedophile rings does little to recommend it as a source of serious information.
It is worth remembering that as well as the infamous alt.sex hierarchy, there are groups like alt.abuse.recovery, alt.arts.ballet, rec.arts.drwho, sci.space.shuttle, and many (thousand) more. If you can persuade the people that populate these groups to help you then their information can be very valuable, and considerably more up-to-date than some web pages.
Persuade is the operative word. The people in these groups are (usually) private individuals. They don't work for your service provider and nobody is paying them to answer your questions. Getting them to do so anyway is not as difficult as you may think. People like to show what they know. All they need is to be asked nicely.
A flame is a angry, insulting, or otherwise offensive message. The second part of the question is far more complex! In a population of over thirty million people there are always going to be some idiots and, given human nature, we're never going to be able to filter all of them out. However, there are times when normal, rational, stable people can be driven to sending flames.
Offensive messages may or may not bother you, but if you're after information then they are not in your best interests. Likewise, it will do you no favours to irritate or offend the very people that you are asking.
Here are a few guidelines for effective use of the Usenet resource:
There are more newsreaders now than you can shake a stack at (sorry!), and a lot of them are free. It is worth trying a few out to see what they can offer you, and which best fit your needs. I would recommend one that allows you both to read news offline and download news headers in advance of the article. A good choice for Windows users would be Free Agent
Some newsgroups have a very high throughput, sometimes well over a thousand posts per day. A good newsreader can save you much time and, if you pay by time for your access, money too.
Download a complete list of newsgroups and word search for the topic that interests you. Try other related words and try and get as close a match as possible. With over sixteen thousand groups to choose from it is extremely unlikely that there isn't one for your topic. If you really can't find anything to do with your topic, try searching for related words on Deja News.
Sounds rather furtive, doesn't it? Actually it just means to join a newsgroup and not post. Download all the message headers and look through them. Someone may have already asked your question for you, or at least got close to it. Even if there aren't any posts on your subject, you can learn a lot from looking through past messages.
Is the newsgroup actually about what you thought? Some newsgroups have very misleading names. Sometimes this is because the group was created a long time ago and the topic drifted over time, other times it is due to a simple misunderstanding. Either way, off-topic messages are rarely well-received, so checking first would definitely be in your interest.
What sort of messages are being sent? The tone of discussions vary wildly from newsgroup to newsgroup. Some are genteel and refined, some are rowdy, and some are just plain homicidal!
Are there any flames? If there are, do a rough percentage and see if it's a rough neighbourhood.
What sort of message provoked the flames? If it's the type that you are about send, a quick rethink might be in order!
How dense is the traffic? If nobody is posting to that newsgroup then posting your question there isn't going to do you much good. Conversely, you may have to wait for a couple of days for an answer, so make sure that downloading headers from that group for that time isn't going to put your phone bill through the roof!
Most, although not all, well-populated newsgroups have a Frequently Asked Questions list (FAQ). This has the dual purpose of saving the regulars from answering the same questions time and again, and also saving newcomers to the group from having to ask the questions in the first place. All this effort is wasted if the thing doesn't get read, so most FAQs are posted to the group every few days. Have a look through the headers and see if you can spot one.
Wait a day or so and download some more headers. This may seem like a waste of time now but in this area, as with backups, it is far better to be safe than sorry!
Okay, this is the bit where you actually send your plea for help out into the digital world. Make it good. Remember that these people don't know you. The only way they can judge what you're like is by the content, tone and even the spelling of this message.
Don't just baldly ask for the information. Briefly explain why you want it and what you yourself have done to try and find it. If people can see that this matters to you (and why) they're more likely to help you out.
Be polite. This is unbelievably obvious, but there are apparently many thousand people out there who think that a terse demand is more likely to motivate a complete stranger to help them than a polite question!
A properly composed and spelled post will receive more favourable replies than otherwise. Read your posts through before sending them. Spellcheck them too, if possible.
"Thanks in advance" is a good way to end your message. True, you might not actually get anything to be thankful for, but it does show that you appreciate people taking time out to help you.
You may get a response within a couple of hours. Then again, you may get nothing at all. Remember that the news has to propagate across the Internet, be downloaded, read by someone who knows the answer and can be bothered to reply, answered, uploaded, propagate back, then be downloaded and read by you! Think in days rather than hours. If you're in a rush, try a web search instead.
Information gathered from the Internet does not come with any guarantees or warranties. Your post may have just been answered by the head of NASA's research department, or it may have been an ignorant prat from Salford having a laugh at your expense. The electronic medium is a great leveller, but that can be a double-edged sword for anyone looking for accurate information. One consolation is that if you went to a library and looked in a book you still wouldn't have any guarantees of accuracy, but you might be less likely to treat the information you find as suspect...
Yes, I know it's infuriating! You've spent all this time composing a non-inflamatory message, checking your spelling, and posting to the right group, and some jerk flames you anyway.
Get up, go for a walk, and cool off. Then come back and read it again. If it still makes you mad, get up and walk away again. Repeat as necessary!
Satisfying as it would be to vent steam at prats like this, it's counter-productive. You waste time and energy composing your reply, bandwidth sending it, and goodwill when everyone else on the group reads it and concludes that you're no better than him! Replying by email saves on the latter, but is still pointless. The best solution is to ignore him. If he's really offensive, then killfile him (see your reader's helpfile for information on this).
The short answer is, because it works!
The Internet culture is something I'll be looking at in detail in my next article, but one thing I have found is that its inhabitants respect those who first make an effort to help themselves. Not knowing something is not a problem; everyone had to learn once. What really gets on people's nerves is someone who asks a question when the answer is right under their noses!
A word that I haven't mentioned is "Netiquette", mainly because it rarely fails to invoke a lot of twaddle about rules, secret Internet-controlling cabals, flame wars and hidden agendas. For this reason I prefer to use another word.
"Manners."
Frank Beaney, October 1996
for Baudwalk Webzine