• spamming the net with commercial or non-commercial postings.
  and
• maliciously or wantonly flooding newsgroups.

QX.Net explicitly declines to express a numerical boundary at which a posting becomes an instance of spamming or flooding, but this does not mean we have no rule. We have both a guideline for users and a procedural implementation for enforcing the rule.

The guideline is this: There are very few articles that are appropriate for posting to as many as five groups. One fairly common exception is announcements (which seldom have many followups and/or where followups are directed to a single group).

This is the procedure we suggest:
If you are inclined to post an article to as many as five groups, think very carefully about it, and be absolutely sure that you know the purpose of every group on your list; if you have any reason to think that your posting might be a violation of netiquette, please ask QX.Net staff. If you don't ask us and post anyhow, you may be posting inappropriately. Depending on how serious staff feels the violation to be, you may receive a warning that any repetition or similar misbehavior will result in our refusal to renew your account when it expires, or, in extreme cases, in termination of your account without refund. (This is the implementation.)

Decision of the QX.Net staff in such cases will be final.

The guideline number of five is not a guarantee that articles posted to fewer than five groups are proof against staff warning and probation, but in general users should be aware that the greater the number of groups to which an article is posted, the greater the risk of staff action.