Usenet Test Newsgroups

You can test your Usenet skills in the test newsgroups, a great place for experimenting with posting and replying. You can try posting a normal message, replying to an existing message, and experiment with threads. The most common test newsgroup is alt.test, although you can find many others by searching your newsgroups for the word "test".

You can test reply to someone else's test message, or to one of your own. You can experiment with creating long threads, and threads within threads.

Some test newsgroups have an interesting special feature. Several news servers that receive messages in test groups as it is propagated across the Internet around the world will send an email to each message sender when they receive your posting, so that you can tell when it arrives at each server. This can be interesting once or twice, but after that you may want to conduct your testing without these emails. In that case, you can tell news servers to not send you these confirmation emails by including the word "ignore" in the posting's subject line.