What is news?

News is the name given to a system of transferring messages between hosts
on the Internet.  The messages it transfers consist of many different types
of messages with many different subjects.   Due to the number of messages
that are seen each day, the news is broken into groups.  Some example
groups would be:

alt.bbs - a public bbs discussion area
rec.humor.funny - a recreational group that has funny jokes.
comp.sys.mac.advocacy - a discussion group on why Macintosh computers are
	superior
comp.sys.ms-windows.advocacy - a discussion group on why Windows is
	superior


As you can see, the groups are widely distributed, and, can be very forward
with their descriptions and subjects.  The news system is broken into the
following main catagories:

rec 	- recreational postings (climbing, tennis, etc)
comp 	- computer related postings
talk 	- miscellaneous talk
alt 	- a 'free for all'.  No main heading, lots of subjects.
soc 	- social postings 
ieee	- postings from the ieee professional engineering group
misc	- miscellaneous postings
sci 	- scientific postings

Each catagory has many sub groups.  Some of these would be:

humor 	- humorous postings (rec.humor, for example)
sys 	- computer systems (comp.sys.unix.admin, for example)
games	- games postings (rec.games.monopoly, for example)

Sub groups can be many levels deep.  

Currently, there are over 2000 groups available on news.  The Roman
Catacombs gets a small subset (~50-100 groups) of those groups, simply
because it is so large.  In the documentation for news, upon setup, they
recommend that the system have more than 600 MEGS of storage minimum to
keep only 7 days of news.  That's quite a bit, averaging 35 megs of
information, COMPRESSED, per day.

The Roman Catacombs currently gets about 3.5 megs, compressed, of news per
day.  If you want to get a group that TRC doesn't get, please talk to the
SysOp.  TRC is very flexible.

How to select groups:
	
You may select groups by going into the newsreader and selecting the groups
you're interested in.  Each newsreader (tin, rn and nn) has it's own way of
functioning, and it's own way of adding and removing groups.   Please see
the manuals for the different newsreaders for more information.