Usenet news

Usenet is an electronic community, consisting of users reading and writing messages on interconnected servers.

We (computer science) have our own newsserver, news.cs.uu.nl which carries the so-called big-8 groups, a selection of regional groups and some local groups.

Etiquette

As with any community there are rules and regulations. We take these seriously (so we will act on complaints). Links for more information:

• Usenet News Etiquette
• NL.* -pagina (dutch)
• The Netiquette

Accessing news

To read Usenet-articles you must have a newsreader, a client tool to browse through newsgroups and articles. By far the most famous (and maybe still the best) is the 'No News is Good News' program nn, found at UNIX systems. However, these days lots of people prefer integrated mail/news applications like Mozilla, Thunderbird or equivalent applications.

People inside our networks can read and post (write articles) at news.cs.uu.nl. People outside our networks can read articles. We can offer more access to other parts of the university, get in touch if needed.

News hierarchies

We carry several news hierarchies. You can recognize a news hierarchy by the first part of the newsgroup name.

• The 'big-8', news.*, comp.*, misc.*, rec.*, talk.*, soc.*, sci.*, humanities.*
• Free software foundation, gnu.*.
• Alt groups, alt.*, not all groups and we don't create groups automatically.
• NL-newsgroups, nl.* Dutch newsgroups. Language is usually Dutch. More information at nl.news-admin.org nl.* pagina
• German newsgroups, de.* Language is usually German. More information at Moderation de.admin.news.announce und Die Hierarchie de.*.
• Berlin, bln.* Language is usually German.
• Belgium, be.*
• USA, us.*
• United Kingdom, uk.* UK Usenet Homepages
• France, fr.*
• Norway, no.*
• Denmark, dk.*
• Cambridge, cam.*
• Italy, it.*
• Hamburg, hamburg.*
• Kassel, kassel.*
• Luebeck, luebeck.*
• Thuringen, thur.*

Known binaries groups are always rejected and too large articles are always rejected. This is a text-only newsserver.

Local newsgroups

We have several local newsgroups for things that are specific to our department. Some of these groups are very important for the information flow and should be handled properly to guarantee that function. That means that they should contain only postings which fit the discription of these groups, as defined below.

Notice that crossposting between a local group and an outside group is not allowed and that some ruuinf.* groups also have a ruucs.* counterpart.

ruuinf.staff

The purpose of this group is mainly announcements to employees of our department. This group is only readable by our employees, i.e. staff-members.

ruuinf.student

This group handles all announcements about educational issues. That means: news about courses, schedules, results, etc. So in contrast to what the name suggest: This is NOT a place where students can start a more or less important conversation about (to name a popular example) smoking in the coffeecorner.

ruuinf.comp.announce

Announcements concerning our computers systems (both hardware and software) will go here. The group is readable by everyone and recent articles are also archived on the What's New page on our website.

Important: These announcements will be posted by the Computer Systems Group only.

ruuinf.library

News concerning our library will go here and will mainly be about new books, reports, magazines, etc. Posting is done by the librarian.

ruuinf.programmeren

All discussions about programming and programming languages go here.

ruuinf.shop

So you want to sell your old ATARI computer or that nice collection of Deep Purple records? You are looking for that missing 'Linux Journal' issue? Try it here. Both students and employees may post here but remember: Commercial postings of any kind are not allowed!

ruuinf.misc

This newsgroup should be used for discussions and announcements not directly related to the department or courses and can be used by both employees and students. Follow-up postings on account of announcements in other groups go here also.

ruuinf.test

As you may have guessed this is an excellent place for test-articles and because of the existence of this group, no test-articles are allowed in any other local group!!

Peering

We are interested in peering the above list of groups with other newsservers.
Peering setup:

# Pathhost: cs.uu.nl
# Feed to: news.cs.uu.nl
# Accept from: news.cs.uu.nl
# Contact: news at cs.uu.nl
# ipv6: not yet
# Groups: no binaries, big-8, alt.*, nl.*, de.*, bln.*, be.*, us.*, uk.*, fr.*, no.*, dk.*, cam.*, it.*, hamburg.*, kassel.*, luebeck.*, thur.*
# Sizelimit articles: 65536 bytes

(Older) overview of news at our site, how to access it and our local newsgroups.

Links

List of Usenet public managed hierarchies

Related pages

Usenet News Etiquette

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