With the popularity of the Web, the spotlight doesn't illuminate Usenet as it once did, but newsgroups are still a popular forum for communication. How Newsgroups Are Organized There are roughly 20,000-30,000 newsgroups organized in to subject and geographic hierarchies. For a master list of these hierarchies, see the FAQ Web site . Alt newsgroups are not all geared toward pornography, alternative lifestyles or sexually explicit discussions. There are thousands of news servers all around the world administered by volunteers.
News servers store newsgroup messages temporarily.
Some servers store messages only for a few days, and others only for a few weeks. Your Internet Service Provider may or may not have a news server. If they do, you will need software, called a news reader, installed on your computer in order to access newsgroups available through their news server. Once you install the software, you choose which newsgroups you want to follow on a regular basis. Each time you use your news reader it will connect to your ISP's news server, download messages from the groups you have chosen to actively follow, and then organize the messages for you to browse through.