What exactly is news groups?

Question

My neighbor talked about downloading music and other stuff fairly quickly. He could also request games and stuff and they were up the very next week. The Internet is not in my name is their anyway I can still use one, I don't care about paying.

Answer 1

News groups go back a long way. They're not part of the WWW but rather a separate entity  like email. In fact, you access newsgroups via your email. Go to your email client account settings and subscribe to the newsgroups that interest you. the best ones appear under the heading of .alt

.alt.music

.alt cd

Subscribing is easy enough. There are several tutorials on the Internet so please do a search. I do not intend rewriting the instruction manual.

Be very careful. It's still highly illegal to download music, midis, games etc if they are commercial. People are watching, and people from the record companies etc., have been known to frequent the groups to nail abusers. The .alt groups aren't moderated so a lot of shady activity goes on there.

News groups are free, the un-moderated ones are full of spam and a lot of posts are fake. Don't give email addresses, details of your bank, your home address, don't offer money and don't step out of line. The last time I visited a newsgroup, over 90 % of the posts were spam or fake. I guess some of the 100,000 or more groups are still okay, but I've never bothered to look. There are much better ways of getting stuff you need these days.