Newsgroups are places where people can share problems, successes, and their overall impression of vendors and their products. The discussion is sometimes humorous, sometimes heated, but rarely boring.
NOTE: The links to the newsgroups work only if you have defined if the usenet news server configured to your web browser has those newsgroups. If your service provider does not have news server then you can try to access the newsgroup through some free web based services like Dejanews or Alta Vista Usenet Search.
It is a good idea to read the FAQ lists of those newsgroups before posting to them. There are two places there you can find the general FAQ for the whole sci.electronics group of newsgroups. There is electronics FAQ archive at Fil's Electronics FAQ at http://www.repairfaq.org/ is another good electronics FAQ collection.
The newsgroups above are international newsgroups and discussion on them is done using english language (both American and British english are OK).
Because the news are international, the articles posted to them will be distributed to thousands of servers around the world. Some of those servers will archive the articles for long time. For example Dejanews archives articles from newsgroups to their searchable database for long time.
If you for some reason don't want your article to be archived in this kind of services, you have to indicate this in your posting by adding a following line to your message header:
x-no-archive: yes
Because the newsgroups are international and there are any readers to the articles. Some of the article readers are not interrested in the article itself, but for other information it reveals of you. So it might be a good idea to think what information of yourself to put to the article signature. Be also warned that the spammers are ocnstantly scanning newsgroups for new e-mail addresses, so it might be a good idea to put some nospan e-mail address to the message when posting to international newsgroups.
If you for some reason post an article to one newsgroup, but feel that replies to your articles hould be sent to another newsgroup (they belong better there) you can add the following line to your message header:
Followup-To: newsgroupnameThis will cause the follow-ups sent to yout articles to be posted to the newsgroup specified in this line. Note that the newsgroup name you give here must be a real existing newsgroup.
There are some things to remember when reading and posting to Usenet newsgroups. Following the generla guidelines keeps everybody happier:
Remeber that most newsgroups are worldwide in coverage. That means that criticizing someone's English, making nationalistic remarks, personal insults, and criticizing another poster's intelligence are invitations to pointless flame wars. Remeber that if you write a good article, it is going to be understood by most of the people who read it, but be prepared that there are almost always some people who do not understand your article completely right.
If you're asking for advice, please give some indication of where you live. Telephone and electrical systems are not the same all over the world. If you are looking for a palce to buy something, then it is a good idea to tell in what country you live in so that you don't get half dozen recommendations where to biy the thing from other side of the world.
Take a note that computer equipment that will be used to read these messages is anything but uniform. Any extensions that your computer has to support various character sets will not always be reliably transmitted or displayed at the other end. So avoid fancy superscript characters, degrees temperature, greek letters, and line drawing characters like the IBM PC extended character set. If you try to make ASCII drawings to your text, please meake sure that they are made so that tyehy display correctly on other people also (draw them using fixed witdth fonts and using space characters instead of tabulator).
You should also consider where a poster is when they request the closest source for some product or information. Not everybody has a Radio Shack in the nearest shopping mall. A common problem is that the toll free 800 numbers common in North America are not easily or cheaply accessible from the rest of the world. Look closely at the orginators domain address to see if they can affordably contact your recommended source.
Keep in mind that various systems and standards are different around the world. Household power voltages and frequencies are different, and the techniques and regulations to deal with wiring are different enough to cause safety problems if you try to use the wrong one. Video systems (orginally tied to the power line frequency) are also widely different around the world. Different scan rates and encoding systems make things incompatible.
Not only are the systems different, so is the jargon used to describe them. And what was written as 4.7 k ohms, might by (from the requirements of the schematic drafting standards) be given as 4k7 ohms.
Web based discussion forums are one good alternative when there is no specific newsgroup for your topic or too much traffic on each newasgroup scares you.
Mailing list are also an useful source for all kinds of information. They are more closed forums than newsgroups and communication is done in them via e-mail.