Web forums, discussion boards, and Q&A sites

Before we proceed to software archives and homepages, let's go where the online worldtakes place!

Usenet groups

It all began with the Usenet. Around 1980, a long time before the World Wide Web was born, this discussion network emerged. It consists of many thousands of groups, so-called newsgroups, each dedicated to a certain subject. Not to our surprise, there's a TeX newsgroup!

comp.text.tex

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/topics

The easiest way is just to access this URL hosted by Google. Just browse it using its web interface. Alternatively, you could install a Usenet reader program and connect to a Usenet web server. At this point, you should familiarize yourself better with Usenet. A great starting point is its Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet. There you would find an introduction, links to necessary software, and further reading.

comp.text.tex is the classic TeX discussion board. Then and now, there are...