Netiquette

The set of manners and unspoken social rules that govern online discussions. Like traditional etiquette, many netiquette rules are a simple application of common sense. Habits such as using appropriate capitalization, punctuation, and paragraph breaks are basic examples of netiquette. If one disregards netiquette, their posts can come across as shouting, or run-together sentences that are difficult to comprehend. Most users that display poor netiquette are swiftly ignored regardless of the content of their posts.

Newbie

The term ""newbie"" is not unique to Usenet or Internet culture. A newbie is simply anyone without experience in a certain field. On Usenet, newbies are often considered to lack a good understanding of netiquette. Many newbies will lurk in newsgroups to get an idea of the social norms and tone of a particular group.

ob-

Stands for ""obligatory"". This prefix is used to add topical content, no matter how trivial, to an otherwise off-topic post. For example, in a newsgroup such as rec.sport.soccer, an otherwise off-topic post about a famous actor may contain an ""ob-soccer"" reference to a soccer related movie, or even something as trivial as a game's score that day.

Off-Topic

Any article that does not conform to the subject of the newsgroup. Some newsgroup users hold extremely negative opinions towards off-topic posting, while other newsgroups may be totally lenient. A number of off-topic articles may contain ""ob-"" (obligatory) content to give the article some relevance to the newsgroup.

Post

A single message on Usenet. In text newsgroups, a post is the same as an article. In binary newsgroups, due to the complexity of binary files, most posts consist of many articles.

Provider (host)

The company or other entity that provides Usenet connectivity. This can be an ISP, workplace, or university, among other things.