BlueJay, there's a big difference betwen newsgroups on USENET (groups in the alt.*, rec.*, comp.*, etc. heirarchies), bbs's, and web-based boards like the 'Cat. Newsgroups were around before the web was commonly used, and therefore don't have the same sort of flashy interfaces. Your USENET experience does depend a lot on the newsreader you use; Netscape and Outlook both have built-in newsreaders which are ok for threading but have very little in the way of managment (killfile, etc). Agent is supposed to be pretty good, though I haven't tried it. I use trn or rn or even pine on my Linux box.
There are a number of other web-based bulletin boards with various capabilities: the best example is probably Slashdot.org, which is built on opensource slashcode, which has a moderation system and various fun things to play with. The Ultimate Bulletin Board system is widely used too; for example, at linuxnewbie.org, or somewhere on nitrozac.com, although their server has been down much of the weekend.
HTH.


Chocolate Pi (who managed to crash my Linux box (the first system crash I've had since installing Linux back in January, yay stable os) while compiling a nasty TeX file)