jay jay wrote:
I have found the info I needed in my ISP's help but am going to have a
look at individual.net as well. Only problem now is, do I have to have
a web page in order to register with URG and is that how you access the
newsgroup fully?

once you point your newsreader at the server (and, depending on the
server, fill in the boxes for user/password) then it's just a matter of
letting it download a list of available groups and 'subscribing' to them
(i.e. telling your newsreader which ones you want).

You also get a choice of downloading just the headers (ideal for slow
dialups) or the whole message (fast dialups, broadband etc.) and you can
read messages. You reply in a similar manner to emails, or create new
threads, and the reader takes care of submitting them to your server.
Job done. They then 'ripple' round the world.

Usenet is a 'publish and be damned' medium, although there are
mechanisms for cancelling messages after submitting they are not always
successful. The freedom to post, unhindered, can lead to abuse so it is
polite to read some guides to netiquette and the charters of the groups:
http://www.usenet.org.uk/usenet-info...tml#Netiquette
http://www.usenet.org.uk/uk.rec.gard....rec.gardening
Basically, as long as what you post is relevant to the title of the
group you can't go wrong!

Note that most uk groups try to discourage html postings, and that some
servers will not propagate them. It's advisable to make sure your
newsreader is posting plain 7-bit ascii. (default for almost all of them
except Microsoft!)
http://www.usenet.org.uk/ukpost.html

------- things not to worry about too much ---------

There are also religious wars about the length of .sigs, about
top-posting vs bottom-posting, and about the amount of 'trimming' when
replying to messages. You'll pick it up easily.

Unfortunately Microsoft products assume top-posting, when most of the
uk.* pre-dates microsoft and prefers bottom posting (it helps blind
people understand what their automated readers are saying to them, for a
start). But there is a fix for Outlook Distress, which also improves
readability in other ways as well:
http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/

You install that, and create an icon to start quotefix, and it starts OE
for you. Clever.

I now use Firefox for mail and news, and it's heaps better than OE:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://mnenhy.mozdev.org/ - add-on to improve usenet handling.