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Groups, threads, and articles

Alt.lifestyle.furry is just one of many thousands of usenet newsgroups. Its only natural that the furs who use the newsgroup regard it as a pretty special place, but its really just a container for our messages in much the same way as a directory contains files, or a file contains data.

You could compare a newsgroup with a channel on Internet Radio Chat (IRC), a board on a Bulletin Board System (BBS), or a mailing list. It has similarities with each of these things.

Newsgroups are arranged in a hierarchy, with each level separated by a dot in the name. The top level of the hierarchy is on the left (unlike domain names), so alt is the top level hierarchy of our group.

Often "newsgroup" is shortened to "group", and the name of a group if shortened to its abbreviation (more or less), so "alt.lifestyle.furry" becomes "alf".

Other newsgroup abbreviations you are likely to come across are:

Articles

Each message that someone has posted is called an article. Because of the way Usenet works, articles typically don't arrive in the same order on each news server. Sometimes you may even be able to read a response to an article when you can't see the original.

Each news server numbers the articles as they arrive for its own internal use. Since these numbers aren't consistent from one server to another, you can't say "look at article 49375". To get round this, articles also have unique message ids that are the same across all the servers. The problem with these is that they are meant for the machine to follow, not us.

Threads

All, well almost all, news reading programs (clients) collect articles into related sets called threads. Each thread is supposed to be a related set of articles about a specific subject. When a reponse is posted to an article it usually goes into the same thread. Inevitably, the topic of a thread changes as the conversation progresses, this is called thread drift.

Different clients may thread articles differently, some consider that is the subject line changes, then this marks the beginning of a new thread. The articles in the thread may be sorted by date, poster, or some other scoring scheme. You can't refer to another article as "the post above mine in this thread" because the order may be very different on someone else's screen.