In the UseNet culture, there is no government and anyone can post whatever they want. It is basically an anarchy. When commercial entities discovered the UseNet, they started posting advertisements and very quickly newsgroups started to fill up with junk. The UseNet community reacted vehemently! They started posting hate-mail, and messages discouraging companies from posting advertisements. The hate-mail messages, and eventually any negative post aimed at a specific person, became known as "flames". The advertisements became known as "spam" (from the Monty Python sketch "Spam Spam Spam"). Spam has grown to include any message posted to a newsgroup that is an advertisement, off-subject, or cross-posted to too many groups. Lately it has also been applied to unsolicited bulk email. Eventually, a set of basic rules came out of these battles. That set of rules is refered to as "Netiquette".
Netiquette has a fairly fluid definition that changes slightly depending on who is defining it. However if you follow this set of rules, you should be safe:
Always follow the postings in a newsgroup for a while before writing your own post. Read about a week's worth of posts to get an idea of what the community of that particular newsgroup is like.
Never post a message that is strictly promotional or commercial in nature unless that newsgroup is designed specifically for those posts. You can usually find a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions document) about that newsgroup somewhere in the newsgroup itself. Do not post a message that says, "hey, check out my cool web site."
Never post an off-topic message. In other words, do not post a message about SCUBA diving in a skydiving newsgroup.
Be polite.
Do not send your post to more than one newsgroup. While it is allowed in some cases to post to a few newsgroups, it is safer to simply refrain from cross-posting.
If the members of a newsgroup flame you for a posting, do not post a similar message ever again to that newsgroup.
Treat others as you would have them treat you.
Keep your signature file short. Some people put many, many lines at the end of their message that are basically useless. A general rule of thumb that works well is, keep the signature portion of your message to eight or fewer lines.
When replying to a post, do not include the entire original post in your message. Only include the portions necessary to convey your meaning.
I strongly recommend you read through the postings in news.announce.newusers before posting anything to a newsgroup. This group contains postings about proper netiquette, rules for posting to Usenet, and descriptions of the documents/groups that are important to read.
If you would like to advertise in a newsgroup, it is possible to do so while still following the rules above. The best way is to include a "signature file" at the end of each of your posts. A signature file is a few lines that always get appended to the end of your messages. For example, if you receive an email from me, the last few lines will be:
-----> Do you prefer to live life or watch it slide by? <----- Carl P. E. dos Santos carl@adventureliving.com Adventure Living http://www.adventureliving.com/
That is currently the signature at the end of every message I send. By including a signature file that includes the URL of your web site and some phrase or sentence that piques curiosity you will build traffic to your web site. Consider it a very tiny commercial.
There are also a few newsgroups in which it is permitted to post announcements and/or promotions. Usually these fall in the biz., *.forsale, *.announce groups. However, make sure you know what you are doing! Read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions document) for that newsgroup before you decide to post your announcement. If you aren't absolutely sure it is allowed, don't post it!
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Copyright © 1995-1998 Carl P. E. dos Santos All rights reserved |
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