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Learn how to read Usenet posts

Other important structures within posts

The double colons - ::

The double colons are used to distinguish spoken text from an action. E.g. ::sitting there and falling asleep::, ::waving right hand::, ::counting to ten::, etc.

The square brackets - [ ]

As part of the subject line, they usually mark a tag. To learn more about tags, please choose "List of well know tags" from the project main index page. Here I will only refer to square brackets inside the message body.

Unlike round brackets, that are used for inserting additional information into the text flow, square brackets are for comments of the author that don't belong directly into the text flow. E.g. comments on top of a post, regarding the way how the post was posted: "[posted and mailed]", "[Crosspost to alt.whatever got removed]". Another example are comments about quoted text, e.g. "[note of author: this is just a theory]".

Sometimes they are also used for informal headers, set by the author, so readers don't get lost in very large posts, where the author is jumping from one topic to another one. E.g. "[Topic: Environment Pollution]". In case of replies, authors sometimes summarizes what other people said, instead of repeating it word by word: "[Mike doesn't like basketball]". Also binaries are usually not reposted in replies, so you would use "[Image]" to show people that your comments refer to a posted image.

Last but not least, they are used together with periods as place-holder, if the author had to shorten a quoted reply (because without shortening posts will become unreadable sooner or later). E.g: "This was a very nice party, although we did not realize that at first, and so we stayed all night long" can be quoted as "This was a very nice party [...] and so we stayed all night long".

The spiky brackets - < >

They can have a lot of different meanings. At first they are used like HTML tags. There is a beginning tag like <something> and a ending tag like </something>. Everything in-between them is affected by them. E.g.:

<sarcasm>
Sure, why not just destroying them all? That will surely solve the problem!
</sarcasm>

A happy, ironic smiley may not have been ironically enough this time and without sarcasm tags you can never be sure that people recognizes that this was sarcasm.

Another meaning is to use them to describe an emotion that you can't show with emoticons. Like <feeling lonely> or <feeling sick> or the famous <g> for grin, <gg> for bigger grin, <eg> for evil grin and <bg> for big grin. Since feeling is not really an action, more a condition, you wouldn't use the colons here.

Sometimes you will also see the famous "<snip>", which is a place-holder for multiple paragraphs of quoted text that had been cut out in the reply. It is often used to show that a sentence is quoted out-of-context.

Quoting outside text - |

In case you want to quote text from external sources, you shouldn't use ">" for that, as then people will mistake it for quoted text. I personally use use "|" for that. You may also use something else, but many other chars have special meanings, that's why using "|" is a good idea. E.g.:

| This is some quoted text.
| Just like that.
                - And this is the source

Giving your text more style and emphasis

The first important fact you need to know is what capital letters mean. When you write something completely in capital letters in means shouting. Just like you don't speak with the same volume all the time in real life, you can also vary your volume on the Usenet. THIS MEANS I'M SHOUTING AT YOU. You can also use it to give one word more emphasis than the rest, e.g. "[...] and I really MEAN it!"

Since HTML posts are very unpopular (increase posts by 50%, aren't compatible with most Usenet clients, etc.), there are other ways known how you can give your text more style:

Cursive words are seen as being more emphasized than the rest, bold words are being strongly emphasized. Underlined words often give a sentence a "certain" meaning, which mainly depends on this single word.

ASCII Art

ASCII Art is named after the ASCII standard, a standard that defines a set of 128 different chars, representing all the standard chars you find on your keyboard. Nowadays there are extended char-sets, which include chars of other languages since the ASCII char-set was made for US keyboards only, but the first 128 chars of those extended char-sets are still ASCII compatible. That means regardless of what char-set you use, ASCII chars will be displayed correctly on your PC.

People very soon got the idea to use those standard chars for creating graphics. ASCII Art are pictures that are made by only making use of the 128 standard ASCII chars. The problem with such pictures is, that they only look well in mono-space fonts. With other fonts, they will lose their layout as now spaces don't have the same size as the other chars anymore and two different chars don't need to have the same size either. Let me show you an example.

The following lines show you a flying letter (try using your imagination a bit):

______ _______________
      /______        /
____ /              /
    /       _____  /
__ /       _____  /
  /______________/

This only works because I used a fxed-size (aka mono-space) font. If I would use the standard font of this document, the picture would like that:

  ______ _______________
      /______        /
____ /              /
    /        _____  /
__ /       _____  /
  /______________/

ASCII Arts are sometimes used in signatures. So when you see some stupid chars at the end of a post, maybe it should be an ASCII Art. To see those correctly, you either must choose a fixed-size font as standard font for reading news or you must copy these lines to clipboard and paste them into another applications where you can choose such a font. A very famous fixed-size font is Courier or Courier New.

The prediction "Ob"

Sometimes you can read a poster's name inside a message with a "Ob" in front. The "Ob" means "Obviously" and is put in front of the name to make a prediction about what this person might reply to one of your statements. E.g.

Let me tell you are story...

ObPeter: Oh no, not again from his childhood.

What, did I already tell you about it?

As you can see above, someone tried to predict what "Peter" might reply to the first statement. That very useful if you want to immediately comment possible replies to one of your statement.

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