A frequently asked questions (FAQ) list is often used in articles, websites, email lists, and online forums where common questions tend to recur, for example through posts or queries by new users related to common knowledge gaps. The purpose of a FAQ is generally to provide information on frequent questions or concerns; however, the format is a useful means of organizing information, and text consisting of questions and their answers may thus be called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked.
A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups.
A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server providers.
Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery, coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr.
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible.
X-No-Archive, also known colloquially as xna, is a newsgroup message header field used to prevent a Usenet message from being archived in various servers.
A discussion group is a group of individuals, typically who share a similar interest, who gather either formally or informally to discuss ideas, solve problems, or make comments. Common methods of conversing including meeting in person, conducting conference calls, using text messaging, or using a website such as an Internet forum. People respond, add comments, and make posts on such forums, as well as on established mailing lists, in news groups, or in IRC channels. Other group members could choose to respond by posting text or image.
When a message is replied to in e-mail, Internet forums, or Usenet, the original can often be included, or "quoted", in a variety of different posting styles.
The Breidbart Index, developed by Seth Breidbart, is the most significant cancel index in Usenet.
talk.origins is a moderated Usenet discussion forum concerning the origins of life, and evolution. It remains a major venue for debate in the creation–evolution controversy, and its official purpose is to draw such debates out of the science newsgroups, such as sci.bio.evolution and sci.bio.paleontology.
The Good NetKeeping Seal of Approval or GNKSA is a designation that indicates a piece of Usenet newsreader (client) software meets a set of usability and formatting standards. The name is a play on the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval", a set of consumer reports issued by Good Housekeeping Magazine.
Elvis is an enhanced clone of the vi text editor, first released in January 1990. It introduced several new features, including syntax highlighting and built-in support for viewing nroff and HTML documents. Elvis is written by Steve Kirkendall and is distributed under the Clarified Artistic License (ClArtistic) which is used by Perl and is a GPL-compatible free software license.
Usenet II was a proposed alternative to the classic Usenet hierarchy, started in 1998. Unlike the original Usenet, it was peered only between "sound sites" and employed a system of rules to keep out spam.
rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated is a moderated Usenet newsgroup that focuses on the science fiction television series Babylon 5 and the works of writer J. Michael Straczynski. It was spun off from its un-moderated version, rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5, in 1996. The newsgroup counts Straczynski as a frequent contributor, and was among the first internet-based forums where fans interacted directly with a 'showrunner'.
Conversation threading is a feature used by many email clients, bulletin boards, newsgroups, and Internet forums in which the software aids the user by visually grouping messages with their replies. These groups are called a conversation, topic thread, or simply a thread. A discussion forum, e-mail client or news client is said to have a "conversation view", "threaded topics" or a "threaded mode" if messages can be grouped in this manner. An email thread is also sometimes called an email chain.
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.
The Corley Conspiracy is an opera by Tim Benjamin to a libretto by Sean Starke, who also directed. The work premiered on 19 September 2007 in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre in London; the orchestral parts were played by the ensemble Radius. The opera was commissioned by the London Design Festival 2007.
Usenet, USENET, or "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
The Meow Wars were an early example of a flame war sent over Usenet which began in 1996 and ended circa 1998. Its participants were known as "Meowers". The war was characterized by posters from one newsgroup "crapflooding", or posting a large volume of nonsense messages, to swamp on-topic communication in other groups. Ultimately, the flame war affected many boards, with Roisin Kiberd writing in Motherboard, a division of Vice, that esoteric Internet vocabulary was created as a result of the Meow Wars.
