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Getting help and information

TYPO3 is known for its grand community, providing great support on a very familiar and friendly basis. Beginners, advancers and experts are sharing their great knowledge and give help to so called "newbies". We exchange experience and find solutions for problems at our everyday work.

This tutorial will give you a short overview of the advantages of a newsreader and it will hopefully motivate you to do "the switch" from mailing lists to the newsgroups. It's simple and it's really worth it!

A better way of distributing messages

Messages from the mailing lists are simply mails, pouring into your mailbox like any other email. If you use the newsgroups, these messages (often called "postings", not mails) are fetched, managed and also sent from a special program (a "newsreader", or "news client"). You surely have gotten used to your favorite mailing lists, and that's ok, because each mailing list represents a newsgroup or vice versa, provided by the generously netfielders websolutions company. So you won't have to learn something new when it comes to the structure.

Facts & Figures

Just to give you an impression of the enormous amount of information that's being shared on the mailing lists / newsgroups, here are some interesting figures:

• Approx. 20 GB of traffic per month (!)

• Posts going out via the listserver: approx. 2.5 million. per month
  

• About 5500 postings per month have been sent via the newsserver
  

• 3000 per month via mailinglist.
  

Subscribers on the main mailing lists:

• typo3-english: 1895
  

• typo3-german: 1151
  

• typo3-dev: 439

plus: about twice as many users visit via Newsserver.

..and it's rising each month! Now if you do the math, you'll see why attachments are not allowed in mailing lists or newsgroups. One simple screenshot of 100KB could easily result in a traffic of 200MB (!) when sent in the english list, for example.

So, if you have something to show, put it online somewhere, and include a link to it in your mail/posting!

Advantages of the newsgroups

There are a lot of advantages of using newsgroups instead of mailing lists:

• Clear separation of mails (your mailbox) and postings. No need for setting up filters in you mail program to keep track of the info that comes in.Everything sits nicely where it belongs.

• Threading: "threaded view" is the most powerful feature you have when you do it "the newsgroup way". It means that you have a view of coherent messages, which gives you a visual impression of how the discussion went (who answers who etc.). This example screenshot shows a big thread in the dev-list/group.
  

• Easier subscribing/unsubscribing to groups. Just a few clicks, and you can easily add groups or remove the ones you don't want to follow any more. You could - for example - download all headers of a special group, select the postings you are interested in (maybe months old), get the info you wanted and then unsubscribe. This flexibility is simply not possible using the mailing list. Unlike mailing lists, the newsserver does not require any subscription!
  

• Get organized! Newsgroups can be ordered nicely to the criteria of your choice, time, author, thread name...You can even filter out authors or topics you don't want to be bothered with. Keep your mailbox clean, and have a better overview on what's happening in the TYPO3 community.
  

• Save traffic! Since you only get the headers of the messages, it's your own decision which mails you want to download (=read) and which not. This is the big reason why everybody should use accurate subjects for their messages.

Doing it the newsgroup way! Setting it up:

Even if you don't know it: you most likely have a newsreader (or "news client") on your computer. For example: Microsoft Outlook Express (which is not the No.1 choice, by the way). Recommended newsreaders are
Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla (the suite) or Opera (includes a newsreader, too).

We can't go into details about all the news clients around here (more info here: OpenDirectory about newsreaders), but if you are undecided, here is the recommendation: use the great mail/newsclient Thunderbird by Mozilla. It's free, works on most platforms and sticks to the standards. We like that.

If - for some reasons - you have to use Outlook Express, please, do us a favour: install the small program Quotefix for OE to correct some errors of Outlook's newsreader..

If you have trouble accessing newsgroups from your workplace, school etc., it might be an issue to talk about with your network administrator: this person should enable port 119 (NNTP) to make newsgroups work.

2 minute-tutorial

Watch this little Flash-Movie to learn how easy it is to subscribe to newsgroups. We use Thunderbird for the demo here, but it's almost the same with Mozilla. Outlook Express has a "Wizard", too, for easy configuration.

The most important data you have to remember: the newsserver's name is news://news.netfielders.de

ENJOY!