This article is based on material authored by members of the news.newusers.questions Moderation Board and nnq-workers mailing list, particularly by Jon Bell, Dennis D. Calhoun, Kathy Morgan and—since 2007—Thor Kottelin.
While some newsreaders may come pre-subscribed to groups like news.newusers.questions, there are many other newsgroups out there! Here's how to get to them.
Your newsreader software should have a way of listing all the newsgroups your news server carries. In Netscape, you might select Options > Show All Newsgroups; in Microsoft ® Outlook Express, Tools > Newsgroups.
As you download the list for the first time, be patient. You may need to wait several minutes before the download completes. If you interrupt the download, you may end up with a corrupted list. Should this occur, shut down your newsreader, and delete the file that contains the group list. If you are unsure which file that is on your system, ask for help!
When you have downloaded the list, your newsreader will show it to you either as one long list of groups, or grouped by hierarchy, such as alt, comp, and the like. In the latter case, clicking on a hierarchy will usually show you the groups and/or sub-hierarchies within.
News servers often carry only a subset of the newsgroups for a hierarchy, so you may find it useful to get a comprehensive list. However, please note that these lists are very long, and it can be difficult to use them to find newsgroups on specific topics. For that purpose, you will probably find it much easier to use a newsgroup search engine.
For the official list of newsgroups in the "Big Eight" hierarchies (comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc and talk), see the article labeled Subject: List of Big Eight Newsgroups in the news.announce.newgroups newsgroup. You can also find the list on the ISC's FTP site.
The same site also carries a list of newsgroups in many hierarchies (including the Big Eight, alt, and many national, local and regional hierarchies). This list is large, but appending .gz will get you a compressed version in GNU gzip format. These lists are intended to be authoritative for the Big Eight; they are not authoritative for any other hierarchy.
You can also find lists showing the top 100 newsgroups in terms of number of postings, and readership on one server, at NewsAdmin.
You could also post a question to the news.groups.questions newsgroup - they have people who look for both newsgroups and mailing lists about any topic you're interested in.
Another thing to do would be a Google Groups search for a newsgroup by the topic you are interested in. Enter a word or two that describes your topic of choice into the search box. The search should return a list of newsgroups that are most likely to discuss the topic you are interested in, along with some sample articles containing your search terms.
In order to read articles posted to a newgroup, you would normally first subscribe to that group. This is often done by ticking a box next to the newsgroup name in the newsgroup list, or by clicking first on the newsgroup name, and then on a Subscribe button. Extended instructions for a number of newsreaders is available.
You may also be able to subscribe using your web browser, either by typing in a news URI such as news:news.newusers.questions, or by clicking on a hyperlink that points to a newsgroup.
The groups you subscribe to should automatically reappear the next time you start your newsreader.
Your news server might have a huge amount of messages for a group you select. If this is the case, you may need to do two things in order to avoid overloading your newsreader:
Before posting to a new group, it's a good idea to read at least a week's worth of postings and any FAQs for the group. This will familiarize you with the group, and help you learn the culture of the group. It's much better to start by finding out what kind of posts are appropriate in the group, than to get flamed for posting in the wrong place.
For a quick and easy way to get a week's worth of postings, and any FAQs that are crossposted to news.answers, go to NewsReaders.com and enter the name of the group in the search box at the bottom of the page. There may be other FAQs posted to the group but not crossposted to news.answers, so look for any postings with FAQ, Tip, or a similar word in the subject.