Usenet has been around a long time and a wide variety of standard practices have arisen. This doc attempts to explain some of those standard practices.
Sometimes there's a good reason to that maybe you don't understand. Try asking. Sometimes there's no practical reason, but that doesn't mean you can ignore it. At the very least, when you come onto Usenet, doing things the Usenet way is polite (and, since Usenet is huge, being polite is a good idea!)
One of the basic premises you should get used to is that not all newsreaders are alike. Some have more features than yours. Some have less. There is a standard set of features, though, which most newsreaders can handle. (Incidentally, complaining that your newsreader can't do something in the standard feature set won't get you any sympathy; the expectation is that you should get another newsreader or another Internet provider that *can* do whatever the problem is.)
Signature files ("sigs") are those little blurbs at the ends of articles. Most newsreaders have a way of setting up a signature file; consult your documentation.
There are some rules that have grown up about signature files. The most important is that they should be *short*. The usual guideline is four lines, no more. On a practical basis, no one is going to quibble over six, but ten is definitely excessive and well into "rude". Why have a limit? There are several reasons. Your signature file gets tacked onto the end of every message you post. If it's very long, you're wasting time and space on every server across the net. A long sig also wastes the time of people reading your post. Not only can a long sig look like extra text to your post, it can also cause an extra page break in your article that will make people waste time flipping up the last screen just to see the end of your sig. You don't need a long sig; honest, that Rush quote just isn't that awe-inspiring to the rest of us.
You'll often see signature files prepended with a single line containing two dashes with a space, like this:
--
That's just a habit that developed. It's hardly necessary. It can, however, be a useful cue, both to computers and to the reader, that what follows is a sig that can safely be ignored. (In fact, the two dashes with a space standard is actually recommended in the document which governs what Usenet is: RFC1036b. See here.)
Sigs are good places to put pointers to web pages or short notices about your job hunt or your comics for sale. As long as the article a sig accompanies is on topic in the newsgroup, nobody will grouse about your sig being off-topic and your notice gets wider circulation.
A lot of people have rotating or random sigs that vary according to whim. There are a variety of ways to do this. If you're interested in doing this for yourself, you can consult one of those people and ask them how they do it, then maybe adapt it to your own system.
In a discussion thread, what you'll quickly find is that there's a lot of quoted text included in new messages. There's a very good reason for that: Because Usenet is a distributed medium, there's no guarantee that people will see articles in the same order, and even less guarantee that people will see an article before a followup to that article. Quoting is a way of making sure that everybody in the discussion has enough context to follow the discussion.
There's a standard way to quote text, and it looks like this (this is from a mailing list but the principle is the same):
Jonathon S. Tuttle <tuttle@alumni.berlin-polytechnic.de> writes: > I was really surprised that Greg and Mike liked the little FAQs > I wrote up. They rewrote them so much that I really shouldn't be > first author on them any more, but Greg and Mike are stubborn!
Pretty simple. You give the name and e-mail address of the person who wrote the quoted text (this is called an attribution), and you set off the quoted text with a symbol (and usually with a space to make it even more obvious). There's a lot of variation in the standard way of quoting. Some people (or their software) include dates or Message-ID's in the attribution, and some people use colons instead of greater than's as the quote symbol. This isn't a big deal, except that adding stuff to the attribution line can cause it to grow larger than 80 characters, which is bad (see below). Also, mixed quote characters can making multiple layers of quoting confused.
When you're doing multiple layers of quote, the standard is to prepend your quote symbol without an extra space, like this:
Mike Chary <mac7@po.cwru.edu> writes: > Jonathon S. Tuttle <tuttle@alumni.berlin-polytechnic.de> writes: >> I was really surprised that Greg and Mike liked the little FAQs >> I wrote up. They rewrote them so much that I really shouldn't be >> first author on them any more, but Greg and Mike are stubborn! > > Jonathon, give it up. You wrote them, you take the blame for them :)
People coming in from big commercial services like AOL or Compuserve often have different quoting styles, and that can be a problem, especially when you get into multiple levels of quoting. AOL, for example, doesn't do attribution automatically, so AOL people tend to just leave it out. Also the "AOL way" of quoting is to put ">>>" at the beginning of the quoted text and "<<<" at the end, regardless of how many lines are quoted. In this case, the Usenet way is better. That prepended quote symbol just makes the quoted text look obviously different from new text, especially to the practiced reader, and that means you can skip the quoted text easily and quickly if you've already read it.
There are some important things to keep in mind when you're quoting text, and the foremost and most important one is NOT TO QUOTE THE ENTIRE MESSAGE. Just don't do it. Quote what you're referring to and delete the rest. (Tip: learn how to use your text editor to its full potential.)
Usenet is mostly read by people using fixed-width fonts on windows with 80-character lines. The 80-character line is the Usenet standard. Adjust your editor and your newsreader to that width. Use a fixed-width font like Courier. A lot of newsreaders will do fancy things for you in terms of wrapping extra-long lines and inserting returns in your post and changing the width of your screen and so forth. All those things are bad form, because not everybody can do those things. If you pull your screen so that it's about 100 characters wide (maybe you don't notice because you're using a proportional font) and you post something, you'll end up with a message that'll look to the rest of the world like this:
It was waaaaaaay back in Aught-Three...Usenet was just in diapers, and there really _wasn't_ a rec.arts.comics...no, sir! All we had was a bunch of posters who used the keyword [YELLOW] (we used it 'cuz of the Yellow Kid, since that was the Hot Title at the time). So instead of rac'ers, we had the Yellowers. NOW PAY ATTENTION, BOY!!
Hard to read, isn't it? Do everybody a favor, and make sure your lines are less than 80 characters long.
MIME stands for Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extension. There's no Usenet in there. MIME is not meant for Usenet use. Most people's newsreaders can't handle MIME. Don't make posts using the MIME protocol. They're ugly, almost unreadable, and certainly ineffective to the vast majority of your audience.
Since people usually use MIME for its ability to handle attachments like GIFs and JPEGs, this is a good place to mention Usenet's policy on binaries. It's really simple. Binaries are FORBIDDEN on any newsgroup without "binaries" in the name. (A binary is a picture or movie or sound clip or executable--essentially anything that's not plain text.) There's a cancelbot run by Dick Depew which will delete your post if it contains a binary in a non-binary group.
The reason they're forbidden so utterly is that they're generally HUGE. This means they take a lot of time to transmit from site to site and they take up a lot of space on a site. Both of these cost money, and small sites might want to avoid paying the cost of storing and passing along binaries. The only way they can do this is by not carrying binaries newsgroups and that way only works if binaries are restricted to binaries newsgroups.
There are two more facets to this topic. The first is "expire time", one of the parameters each site sets for its storage of newsgroups, usually on a hierarchy-by-hierarchy basis. Expire time is how fast articles disappear from a site once they arrive. With the net as big as it is now, in order to keep the database of articles a manageable size, expire times are now often measured in days. Binaries, being large, make the newsgroups they appear in large, which means that newsadmins are going to make the expire times for those hierarchies smaller.
Furthermore, binaries are often copyright violations. (See Brad Templeton's copyright FAQ in news.answers--use Dejanews to find it.) In order for newsadmins at sites that are sensitive about possible liability to avoid abetting copyright violation, binaries need to be segregated to binaries groups that sites can choose not to receive.
A lot of times what happens in a long thread is the topic of the thread drifts. When that happens what you're supposed to do is change the Subject: line of the post to match the new topic. There's a standard way of indicating that:
Subject: New Topic (was: Old Topic)
Often, Old Topic is truncated--try and keep at least the first twenty characters, but also try and keep the Subject: line down below sixty characters or so. (This is another recommended standard in RFC1036b.)
One of the big Usenet habits that has grown up is the concept of spoilers. If you're talking about a comic book which has just come out, or a piece of information that was just announced, or even a speculation about a mystery that's going to be unraveled in future issues, it's a spoiler. Some people won't have read the comic or heard the news or figured out the mystery, and they like to be surprised, so don't mess with their fun.
Messing up spoilers WILL get you yelled at, so it's important to get it right. You need to clearly indicate that your message contains spoilers in the Subject: line, e.g.:
Subject: DC's '97 publishing plan: SPOILERS!
Notice that the Subject: line does not include the spoiler, either. A lot of people make that mistake; you see posts like:
Subject: Hobgoblin is really [deleted]!
Where [deleted] is filled in. There ain't an easier way to jack with other people's good time, so use your head, and use this instead:
Subject: Hobgoblin's identity revealed! SPOILERS!
Now, not everybody reads Subject: lines before reading posts, so it's also important to include spoiler protection in the body of your post, too. The standard is to make sure that the spoiler information does not appear on the first screen of the post. Since the Usenet standard screen is 24 lines long, that means you need at least 24 lines of material before you start discussing the spoilers. (Even though most people are reading Usenet on screens longer than 24 lines, 24 lines is still the standard. Even on a long screen, it's enough of a gap to give the reader time to stop reading.) The simplest way to get to the 25th line of your post is just to add blank lines.
You'll also hear people talk about ctrl-L. Ctrl-L is a special character that forces a page feed on a standard screen. Since it forces a page feed, it functions the same as enough blank lines to fill up a screen. Here's an example of ctrl-L in action: Did it work for you? (Of course not. Browsers don't support ctrl-L.)
It turns out that a lot of more "advanced" newsreaders no longer honor ctrl-L's, so they don't work for everybody. On the one hand, ctrl-L is the standard, so you're supposed to use it and any newsreader that doesn't honor it is broken. On the other, though, a *lot* of people are reading news on newsreaders that aren't broken in any other respect but which don't honor ctrl-L's. Religious wars have been fought over less! The practical solution for people who use ctrl-L's is to add at least a few blank lines as half-assed spoiler space for those poor people with broken newsreaders.
Avoid using tabs in your posts. Different newsreaders handle them differently, so what looks like a beautifully aligned table on your system looks like gibberish on another system.
There are all kinds of ways to make your text come out gibberish even if it started as perfectly intelligible. Most of them revolve around the fact that the Usenet standard is plain-text seven-bit ASCII. (ASCII is the dominant standard for turning letters, numbers, and punctuation into computer code.)
Usenet is guaranteed to be transmitted in at least seven-bit ASCII. It is *not* guaranteed to be transmitted in eight-bit ASCII. This can cause all kinds of problems, especially with characters whose ASCII codes run from 128 to 255. These characters are predominantly the accented characters used in various European languages. When the extra bit gets stripped off, what used to be intelligible becomes gibberish. Even if the extra bit doesn't get stripped off, there are a lot of different standards for what the high-ASCII characters actually are, and text written with one standard looks like gibberish in another.
Another source of gibberish is word processors. Word processors use embedded control sequences to handle all the formatting of text. If you try to post a word processor document, all the embedded control sequences come out gibberish. Short answer: your word processor should have an option to save a file as plain text or ASCII text; use it.
As a corollary, avoid using smart quotes. They come out as high-ASCII characters, typically Ò and Ó.
There's a separate Keywords: line in the headers, but it's used fairly rarely. Keyword is more often used to mean a flag in the Subject: line of the post. A keyword is a single short word or acronym used to indicate a general topic. The rest of the Subject: line spells out the specific topic. On rec.arts.comics.misc, the keyword KBAC: is used for Kurt Busiek's Astro City, like this:
Subject: KBAC: The Confessor's Secret (SPOILERS!)
Keywords are used to activate killfiles and selectfiles, so it's important that they stand out and be unambiguous. Usually, this means they go at the front of the Subject: line and are in all-caps. They're also set off from the rest of the Subject: line by punctuation. Used to be that the punctuation was a terminal colon, but there's a new-fangled way that uses brackets: [REVIEW]. The colon is marginally more preferable because it's easier to write the killfile line around, but there's not a strong reason to choose either one.
Typical keywords should be obvious, so I'll just give you a few:
| REVIEW: | |
| JLA: | (Justice League of America, a DC comic) |
| ANNOT: | (annotations and the like) |
| FAQ: | (Frequently Asked Questions lists and important docs. Read these!) |
The most important one to know is META:, since it's single-handedly responsible for the longest and meanest threads on rac. It stands for "metatopical" and refers to a thread about the newsgroup itself, not about whatever the newsgroup's topic is. The worst META: threads are arguments about newsgroup policy, but useful META: threads include notices about FAQ-maintainers, newsgroups moderators, and other newsgroup-management information.
You should also recognize RFD: (Request for Discussion) and CFV: (Call for Votes). These are rare, but they're important--these are the formal documents which change the hierachy by adding new groups or changing how the old groups work. (See below.)
Usenet is primarily for one-to-many conversation. If you're thinking about following up to somebody's post, and your message isn't of interest to the general audience of the newsgroup, use e-mail instead. Say somebody's got a mistake in the quote in their sig; tell them by e-mail. Say somebody says something nice about you in one of their posts; say thank you by e-mail. Say somebody asks a question and says they don't read the newsgroup often; answer by e-mail. Say somebody mentions it's their birthday; give them greetings by e-mail. But, say somebody uses Hume as a guide for interpreting a passage in a comic, use a followup post to contest their use of Hume; maybe you prefer Wittgenstein. Anything that furthers the on-topic discussion of comics should be posted; anything that's interesting to only the recipient should be e-mailed.
By the way, another big rule is NEVER E-MAIL *AND* POST YOUR MESSAGE. The person you're following up reads the newsgroup and will see your followup on the newsgroup, you don't have to clutter up their mailbox with another copy. Even if there's a good reason to E-mail and post, make sure your message informs the reader that the message has been both posted and e-mailed, e.g. "[E-mailed and posted]".
Usenet is hierarchical in its organization. That means that discussion is compartmentalized as best as possible into different newsgroups. Every newsgroup comes equipped with a charter that divides the entire infinite range of discussion into "on-topic" and "off-topic". It's critical that you know and understand what makes a topic on- or off-topic. If you get it wrong, the audience that wants to read your message won't be able to find it.
Note the way I said that. It's the audience that picks and chooses what they read. You don't get to pick and choose the audience. You don't get to choose your audience even if your message is really important and everybody should read it. There's a real slippery slope here. If the guy who thinks DC readers will like his new indy comic is allowed to post about it in a DC group (where's it's off-topic 'cause it's not a DC book), there's nothing to stop the religious guy who thinks *everybody* needs to hear his message of universal salvation from posting to *every* newsgroup.
To reiterate, the reason to post only where your post is on-topic is so that the audience can find it.
There are inevitably overlaps between newsgroups, and the people who have been on Usenet longer than you have have worked out how to handle the overlaps. Do it their way, or have a really persuasive argument otherwise and be prepared for a flamewar (aka a META: thread).
A lot of time, the overlap is handled by crossposting the post to both newsgroups where it's on-topic. Crossposting is efficient. Only one copy of the article is transmitted, and newsreaders will only show the article to the reader once, even if the reader reads both groups.
A lot of time, the overlap is handled by defining the problem away. For example, on rec.arts.comics we've decided that superheroes are not the same as comics, so superhero stuff that's not related to comics (Wild Cards or the Greatest American Hero) are not on-topic anywhere on rec.arts.comics.
We've handled overlaps in a couple of cases in rec.arts.comics in a very different way. Suppose you're selling some DC comics. There's a DC group and a marketplace group. Sounds like overlap, so you should crosspost, right? Wrong. What we've decided is that enough people don't want to read for-sale messages so much that they have to be segregated into the marketplace group and *only* into the marketplace group. They're not allowed anywhere else. Similarly, topics like the Batman movie or the X-Men casting call are on-topic *only* in rec.arts.comics.other-media even though they look like they'd be on-topic in the DC group or the X-Men group.
Things you need to know:
Usually what happens is the home group of a hierarchy (rec.arts.comics.misc) will have a discussion about how to expand or change the hierarchy. Somebody who's been around the block a time or two will write up an RFD and submit it to n.a.n., shepherd the discussion through news.groups, and arrange for the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers to handle the CFV. The vote passes if more than 2/3rds of the voters vote YES and there were at least 100 more YESes than NOs. Anybody can submit an RFD. The docs on how are in news.announce.newgroups and news.announce.newusers and they go into a lot more detail than this.
You can also propose RFDs for renaming old groups or changing unmoderated groups to moderated groups. There is not a way to formally change the charter of a group. If you're really serious about changing a charter, make a formal proposal to rac.misc (and the affected group) and find a neutral polltaker to hold a vote for you. Keep in mind that your highest hurdle isn't convincing rac that your proposal is a good one, it's convincing rac that you know what you're talking about, so you should have a good strong track record, especially in terms of knowing about news.groups, votes, and charters. Remember, the people who are in favor of the charter as it is can point to a vote for that charter that passed with a supermajority when the group was created, so your proposal to change the charter has to be *really* convincing.
People on Usenet use a lot of acronyms, like IMHO ("In my humble/honest
opinion") or YMMV ("Your mileage may vary", i.e. your opinion may
differ). There are any number of jargon files that collect acronyms,
but the best way to find out what an acronym means that you can't
decipher is to e-mail the person who used it and ask. It's really
pretty rude to post a message whose only content is "what does
In addition to the aforementioned news.announce.newusers, which
contains a lot of documents useful to the new Usenet reader,
you can read the official documents of the rac hierarchy in
www.bonner.rice.edu/morrow/faq/
www.idyllmtn.com/rac
www.gl.umbc.edu/~fuy1/comics
Original by Greg Morrow
As maintained by the uberFAQ consortium
Last change: 1 Mar 97
Greg Morrow morrow@physics.rice.edu