Web-based access to the newsgroups, via a fast server. You can access the newgroups one of three ways.
The first way gives you access to 30,000 newsgroups, where you can read and post. But retention (how long we keep posts) isn't very long, it's a few days for very binary intensive groups, a few weeks for the rest.
The second way gives you access to several hundred newsgroups (and we can add more if people want). This is also web-based, and has a much higher retention; some months, at least.
The third is access to the graphics-intensive areas by clicking on thumbnails. We call this "The NewsThumbs". This is what people use most.
If the main reason you access the news is because of the pictures, then "The NewsThumbs" is the place for you. The pictures are easy for you to display, and it's also easy to choose what you want, because there's a little thumbnail for each picture, in contact sheets of up to thirty per sheet. That gives you an idea of what's in the picture, and it's fast, because those contact sheets are very compact, at less than 1kb per picture.
If you use the username guest, password sesame, then you'll be able to look around the Newsthumbs and see what's here. You can't use the search engine, and you can't post. Worst of all, you can't see the pictures full-size, you can only see the thumbnails.
You can click on the picture you want to look at, and it will expand to whatever its full size is. Then the back button on your browser, takes you back to the list.
There's also a table, giving information about the picture - its name, file size, width and height in pixels. From that table, you can check the boxes for the pictures you want, and download them all at once as a ZIP file.
Then there's the email address of the person who posted it (or at least, what they gave as their email address). If it's likely to be an invalid address, that's what it says. But if you click on it, you can still try to send email to the address that was given.
Next to that, you can click on "Read" and read the full text of the posting, with the picture in place.
The last thing on the line, is the subject-line of the posting. If that looks like spam, then that subject line will be greyed out (but you can still read it if you want to, and the decision isn't 100%, because it's an automated process).
Each day's pictures are sorted into alphabetical order. First the ones that look like they aren't spam, then the ones that the automated process thinks might be spam. You can go to any other part for the same day, you can go to other days for the same newsgroup, and you can go to other newsgroups.
Also, you can search the NewsThumbs for a picture by name or subject header. This is useful if you don't know which Newgroup is going to be of interest to you, or if you're trying to locate a picture.
Most of this list of Newsgroups won't interest you, and you don't really want to keep loading a huge page full of non-interesting names. So, I've set up a thing called "Favourite Newsgroups". You choose which ones are your favourites, and the server will remember. Then, each time you ask to see your list of Favourite newsgroups, you'll see a much smaller table of just those. Of course, you can change that list any time.
Because of the nature of Usenet and what's on it, we're asking you to accept the following terms and conditions as a condition of letting you use it. If you don't accept those conditions, then don't use the service.
We don't charge for the contents of the Newsgroups, but we have to pay for the computers that this runs on, and for the bandwidth that is used in accessing it. So, in order to use this service, you have to sign up for it, in exactly the same way as you have to sign up for an ISP. And it will cost you per month, every month until you cancel. Maybe you'll decide to become a member.