Navigation Mode-

You're probably wondering why Phoaks needs a stupid mode like this in the first place - you want to find out about stuff, not figure out how to get from point A to point B, which you probably already learned in some fourth grade geography class somewhere. Well, the problem is that Phoaks knows about a lot of stuff - so much, in fact, that you couldn't possibly look at it all at one time. That's not to make fun of you - hey, even we, the geeks that live and breathe Phoaks, couldn't do it, without giving up some of the niceties of life like, umm, sleep and showers. Anyway, because we think that you like to shower, we organized Phoaks to mirror the way Usenet newsgroups are set up.

How are News Groups set up-

Good question. Actually, the way they're set up is pretty neat, once you get the hang of reading them. For example, let's take one of our favorite groups here at Phoaks as an example - rec.music.dylan. As you can probably guess, this group is about Bob Dylan - one of the pholks is a wee bit of a Dylan nut, and he forces us to use this group anytime we need an example. The first thing you need to do to read a newsgroup is to chop it up into little pieces wherever you see a period. So rec.music.dylan gets broken up into rec, music and dylan, and rec.music.really.big.group gets broken down into rec, music, really, big, and group.

With that done, let's start looking at these pieces. The first one's rec - not a very friendly looking set of letters. You can kind it as one gigantic group devoted to anything recreation (that's what it's short for) - everything from good ol' Bob to skiing to knitting - anything at all that can be considered recreational gets lumped in there. The problem is that rec isn't all that specific, so we need to shove another group next to it - music. Now we have rec.music, which would be a group about recreation relating to music. While this is a much more manageable slice of stuff, it's still a bit too much to deal with. So we further narrow it down by sticking dylan at the end, which gives us a group about recreation relating to music by Bob Dylan. If it existed, we could stick another piece on the end of this group, like lyrics, giving us rec.music.dylan.lyrics, which would be a group (you guessed it) about recreation relating to music by Bob Dylan and his lyrics.

The navigation mode, then, is how Phoaks helps you narrow down your newsgroup topic selections from very broad (e.g. rec) to narrow (e.g. rec.music.dylan).

How to use the features on the site-

Last but not least, let's say that you want to find out about a group that is an actual group and has subgroups underneath it. Hmm, that's awfully confusing, so bear with us for yet another example. We can all say that comp and rec is a very broad groups with lot's of subgroups, right? We can even that they're so broad, no one actually uses them to have discussions, since shoving hundreds of thousands of people to talk about nonspecific things is just not a good idea. That's ok, because everyone just goes down to a group that's specific enough for their needs. You have a problem though, when you have some people who want to be specific, and other people who want to be more specific, like in comp.ai. You see, some people want to just talk about computers relating to artifical intelligence, where others want to talk about computers relating to artifical intelligence in vision (comp.ai.vision). In order to handle problems like this, we keep track of both the groups, and let you select The Group Itself when you hit a group like comp.ai. From there, Phoaks treats those special groups just like the normal ones like comp.ai.vision and rec.music.dylan.
Anyway, no matter how you get to a group, either by wandering there or going straight for it, once you get there, Phoaks shifts from navigation mode to one of the resource views so that it can start showing you some of the stuff that it knows about - the default one being the frequency view.

While this is all fine and dandy for getting down to the very specific stuff, you say, what about the less specific stuff? What if you wanted to get a glimpse of what was going on in all of the groups under, say, rec.music?. Well, here comes area summary to the rescue. What a group summary does is exactly that - instead of giving you the top resources for just one group, it gives you the top resources for the entire group area, in this case, rec.music. Go ahead try it - it's pretty nifty if we do say so and there's more help there to explain it if you get lost.