news.acm.uiuc.edu

news.acm is a Usenet news server for UIUC students, staff, and faculty. It carries more than 4,500 newsgroups, all of which are accessible either through a news reader or a web interface. news.acm is run by ACM@UIUC, and is the successor to the news.ks Usenet server run by the student organization Usenet @ UIUC.

More information about the current state of the server is available here, and more information about the server in general will be posted in uiuc.admin.

Quick Links

Champign-Urbana Newsgroups for New Users

The following links only work for on-campus users, or users with a current account.

cmi.announce	Read and post announcements regarding community events here.
cmi.classifieds	Buy, sell, and trade just about anything - except cars, housing, and personals, which have their own groups.
cmi.general	General-purpose discussion of local issues.
cmi.politics	Local, state, national, and international politics.
cmi.consumer	Trying to find a doctor, a lawyer, plumber, or some other professional? Need advice choosing what to buy? Read here for help, or post here to advice others.
cmi.consumer.gourmand	Restaurant reviews and discussion.
cmi.*	All newsgroups discussing East-Central Illinois
uiuc.announce	Read and post announcements regarding University-related events here.
uiuc.general	General discussion of University-related issues.
uiuc.org.*	University Registered Organizations.
uiuc.*	All newsgroups discussing the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specifically.

Accessing the Server

UIUC affiliates can access the news server in one of two ways:

Point your favorite newsreader (nn, pine, Netscape News, Free Agent, etc) at news.acm.uiuc.edu.
- If you are coming from a UIUC system, you should have full access to all groups immediately.
- If you are coming from outside, you will not have access to post to any groups, and will only have read access to 2-3, unless you can authenticate with the server. See here for details on how to authenticate.
- Configuration details for a variety of newsreaders are here; just replace 'news.individual.net' with 'news.acm.uiuc.edu'.
Use the web newsgroup interface, which is not as efficient but may be more convenient.
- Within campus, you can use this page to get full access to the local newsgroups without a password.
- From outside of campus, use this page and login with your authentication information.

User Authentication

Most modern news readers can be configured to use NNTPAuth, which requires a username and password. Your username will be the same as your NetID; your password can be set here, after logging in with your NetID and Kerberos password.

Passwords will expire when you are no longer affiliated with the University. Also note that these passwords are a long way from secure (they are transmitted in plaintext all over the place), so make sure your password is not the same as any other important password (ie your UI Direct password, Active Directory password, etc).

Most graphical browsers make it easy to use NNTP authentication. Text-based browsers, while often more powerful, are also more difficult to configure for authentication; this page may help you for some common readers.

slrn may require a set force_authentication 1 line.

Newsgroup Hierarchies

We currently carry the following hierarchies:

Hierarchy	Feed Info	Notes
uiuc.*	Organizers	uiuc.* contains newsgroups for the University specifically - student organizations, classifieds groups, general discussion fora, etc. It is run by the student organization Usenet @ UIUC. news.ks was its primary home before moving to news.acm, and it is intended for current UIUC students, staff, and faculty only.
cmi.*	Primary Participant	cmi.* is a collection of community newsgroups for Central Illinois. More information about the hierarchy is available here.
illini.*	Primary Participant	illini.* is a new hierarchy being put together by Tim Skirvin to be used to discuss UIUC issues by both current University affiliates and alumni. More information is available here.
Big-8	Full Feed	One of our primary missions is to carry all of the formally created newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchies (comp., rec., soc., sci., news., misc., talk., and humanities.), which are generally considered the "meat" of Usenet. Other hierarchies are added as requested (and pending availability).
bionet.*
chi.*
linux.*
gnu.*
alt.*	By Request	We currently have multiple feeds of these hierarchies, except for the binary distribution newsgroups, but only carry groups that have been requested by users. Currently (11/13) this consists of only 64 of the thousands of groups in alt.*. If anybody wishes to add a group, please contact news@acm.uiuc.edu; a single request should, in most cases, be adequate to add a group.
free.*
bit.*
bofh.*	Full Feed / Sound Site	If you don't know what this hierarchy is, you shouldn't be using it.
unihigh.*	Organizers	At the request of Uni High, we're going to keep these newsgroups alive for another couple of semesters, with future discussions to determine their final fate.

Other hierachies will be considered as requested.

We used to carry the Usenet II net.* hierarchy, but no longer do so due to lack of interest. If you want us to carry this hierarchy again, contact news@acm.uiuc.edu.

Policies

Essentially, follow campus usage policies and you'll be okay.

A few specific policies:

Users do not have access to post "approved" messages (ie moderate a newsgroup) without making prior arrangements with the news manager. However, moderating groups on this server is encouraged. Please contact news@acm.uiuc.edu if you feel you need to do this.
uiuc.org.* groups are for campus registered organizations. If you wish to make a group, again, contact news@acm.uiuc.edu.
No morphing. No spamming. No harassing people. No abusing the network. This is basic stuff; I don't have to remind you.

More Information

For more information on Usenet, please read news.announce.newusers, specifically these FAQs:

Much more information regarding Usenet (and everything else) can be found at the Usenet FAQ Archive.

For help in setting up your newsreader, you may want to check Prairienet's Newsgroup Access page, substituting news.acm.uiuc.edu for news.prairienet.org where necessary.

news.acm.uiuc.edu
Last Updated: Fri, Nov 16 2007
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