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Electronic Discussion Groups
Public electronic discussion groups number in the thousands and cover almost
every scholarly, professional, and avocational topic imaginable. Users
from around the world can participate in these discussions whenever
and from wherever they prefer. In addition, untold numbers of private discussion
groups exist to promote communication among defined sets of participants. The most commonly used forums for
electronic discussion are NetNews
newsgroups and email discussion groups.
Important note: Penn's NetNews
service will be retired on June 30, 2008. Documentation to help users
of this service transition to other services can be found at:
http://www.upenn.edu/computing/help/doc/netnews/alternatives.html
NetNews newsgroups are the Internet equivalent of the interactive bulletin
board systems available on private dial-up facilities such as America
Online. At Penn, newsgroup discussions are stored on the central news
server, netnews.upenn.edu. The University subscribes to thousands of external
newsgroups, including the set of newsgroups known as USENET, which are
considered to be of global interest. External newsgroups include postings
from anyone on the Internet. Because of the large daily volume (hundreds
of megabytes) of postings to these groups, postings are purged every couple
of days to make room for new ones. (Many newsgroups maintain archives,
so it's possible to locate older postings at their archive sites.)
In addition to the external groups, numerous local newsgroups requested
by faculty, student groups, and administrative offices are available only
to the Penn community. Examples are course-related groups and the newsgroups
set up by by student groups, such as upenn.student-activities-council.
To participate in newsgroups, you need to log on to Penn's news server
using "news reader" software, which will let you view the list of all
newsgroups on the server. You can then subscribe to any newsgroups
you wish and read other people's postings or post your own news items.
Each item within a newsgroup is considered part of a discussion "thread."
If you post a message on a completely new topic, you create a new thread
to which others can respond. Your reader software keeps track of which
groups you have subscribed to, the various discussion threads, and the
messages you've read.
The ISC-recommended news readers
are NewsWatcher
for Macintosh and Thunderbird
for Windows. Both are available
from the Supported Products page. The
address of Penn's news server is netnews.upenn.edu and can be
set in the "Preferences" window of your news reader. If you
access Penn's news server from an Internet service provider (ISP),
you will need to identify yourself to the system using your PennKey
and password.
A variety of types of email discussion groups are in use on the Internet and at Penn. Information about setting them up can be found on ISC's Mailing Lists site.
- Personal alias lists. Personal alias lists can be created in most email
products. They allow the creator (owner) to send messages to a single
address and have them go to all the individuals on the list.
- Reflector lists. Some email
servers, including campus servers such as Pobox, allow for "reflector lists," which are similar
to personal alias lists except that anyone, not only the owner, can send
a message to the list.
- Listserves. A more sophisticated type of list, known as a listserve,
has the same basic functionality as the other lists but uses list server
software to provide more formal administration tools: the ability to restrict
list membership and activities, message archiving, and other features.
Some commonly used list server systems are listserv, majordomo, and LISTPROC.
As you explore email discussion groups, you will discover that the administrative
addresses of many discussion groups include one or the other of these
terms.
In addition, ISC and the Registrar's Office provide course email lists in selected Schools. Details can be found on ISC's Class Mailing List Service page .
One key difference between email discussion groups and news groups is
that once you've subscribed to an email list, postings come directly
to your email inbox -- you don't have to logon somewhere else to find
for them. At the same time, it's up to you to manage the messages you
receive, saving and deleting as necessary. Otherwise you may find your
mailbox inundated with mail, particularly if you subscribe to several
active lists. A second difference is the quality of discussion. Many email
lists are moderated (the messages are reviewed for appropriate content
by the moderator or collected into a digest before going out to the group).
Thus there's less likelihood of trivial or repetitive discussion, which
seems to be more common in newsgroups, particularly those that are unmoderated.
Email discussions set up for Penn courses and course newsgroups differ in an additional way. Subscription to course discussion lists is limited
to those whom the instructor authorizes, while course newsgroup postings
can be read by anyone at Penn.
Finding email discussion groups to subscribe to is not quite as easy as
locating newsgroups. Web sites dedicated to related topics are one good
source of list addresses. Another is FAQs (frequently asked questions).
A third is directories such as
CataList,
a searchable catalog of more than 8,000 public lists, and the
Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences (useful but last updated in 2002). A fourth is the set of newsgroups on the NetNews server whose names
begin with "bit.," e.g., bit.listserv.techwr-l. You can look at the
postings to see if you would be interested in subscribing. Finally, you can send email to listserv@listserv.net as follows: leave the subject line blank and In the body of the message, type list global, a space, and then a word or partial word describing the type of listserv you're looking for. For example, if you were looking for a jazz-related listserv, you'd type list global jazz.
Email discussion groups available to the Internet public usually maintain
two network addresses -- one accepts subscriptions and administrative
commands; the other accepts email postings relevant to the discussion topic.
The examples in the next paragraph illustrate the use of the two addresses.
New users frequently confuse them, and send their subscribe or unsubscribe
commands to the posting address rather than to the administrative
address. For Penn students in courses that have a discussion group set up
this is generally not a problem: they're usually subscribed automatically
upon enrollment and get the correct posting address from their instructor.
To subscribe to a listserv discussion, you would send a request
to the list's administrative
address -- listserv@name of listserv -- and include the following
line in the
body of your message:
subscribe name of listserv
To post messages once you've subscribed, you would address them to
the name of the list followed by the machine
name. Because lists
vary in the way they are configured and managed, the above commands won't work
for all lists.
When you subscribe to a list you will usually get a welcome message with
information about where to get help, how to unsubscribe, etc. Be sure to save
that message -- you are bound to need it some day. You will also get a more
technical message that you can safely discard.
Some final words about email discussion groups. Some messages require personal
responses to the original sender; for other messages, it is more appropriate to
send your response to the list. Be careful when using your mailer's reply
command. Sometimes your reply will go to the entire list by default; other times,
replies are sent to the originator by default. Exactly what happens depends
on how the list was set up. If you send a message to a list you are subscribed
to and don't get a copy in your own mailbox, don't worry. Some lists are configured
so that senders do not get their own postings.
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