Usenet News is one of the oldest communities online today. It consists of tens of thousands of newsgroups, discussion forums in which people post (submit) messages and reply to them. One common, text-based newsreader program is slrn, but there are dozens more available on the Net (rn, trn, tin, and so on). Usenet News can also be searched at Google Groups, http://groups.google.com.

In order to access Usenet, you need to connect to a news server, an Internet host that permits reading and posting of news articles. Once you can connect to a news server (say, news.example.com), a record of your subscribed newsgroups and which articles you’ve read is kept in a file in your home directory automatically. Depending on your newsreader configuration, the file is either ~/.newsrc or ~/.jnewsrc.