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Posting and responding to articles can be done from either reading
mode or selection mode. Two important notes concerning posting:
-
Be aware of general network etiquette. Take a look at the articles in the
newsgroup `news.announce.newusers' for information about
netiquette. See section News Etiquette, for more info.
-
Use a test newsgroup when learning how to post articles. Use a
local one if available (we have a `psu.test' newsgroup for psu
testing and an or.test for oregon distribution).
Otherwise, use alt.test or misc.test.
The following commands are available for posting and responding.
The first three give you the option of including the current article.
- R
- Reply through electronic mail to the author of the article. This
is the preferred way to respond unless you think your article
will be of general interest.
- F
- Follow-up with an article in the same newsgroup.
- M
- Mail a letter to someone.
- :post
- Post a new article to any newsgroup. News offers two features:
cross-posting and distribution
control. Cross-posting means that you can post the same article
to more than one group. Do this by entering a comma separated
list of newsgroups when
nn asks for the newsgroup.
Distribution refers to who will see it. Sometimes the issue may
be of interest only to the local community. In these cases you
should choose as small a distribution as possible. This helps
reduce network congestion. At PSU CS,
we have the following possible distributions:
- psu
- Computer Science
- psu
- Portland State University
- pdx
- Portland area
- or
- Oregon
- usa
- United States
- na
- North America
- world
- Everywhere
When you are done editing your response you will be prompted with
several options. The two that are used the most often are send
to send the letter or post the article and abort to throw the
letter/article away.
Go to the previous, next section.