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Usenet Transgressions

We are one of the most respected public access sites in the world; we expect those of our users who participate in Usenet and other usenet exchanges to familiarize themselves with the basics of "Netiquette" as described in the periodic postings to news.announce.newusers, and we will hold our users to appropriate standards.

Articles in flagrant violation of those standards will be canceled and the account of the user responsible is liable to be disabled without notice and without refund of any payments.

Many kinds of anti-social behavior show up in usenet, but some transgressions are worse than others. Right up at the top of the list is spamming.

"Spamming" is the term for posting an article individually to different newsgroups instead of crossposting it.

Crossposting means sending your article to several groups all at once; a single copy of your article is propagated across the net and is referenced from within any of the groups in the Newsgroups: line. Crossposting saves resources (because only one copy of the article is sent and stored), and saves human energy (because most software is smart enough to show it only once to readers unless they explicitly ask to see it again).

Most usenet users consider spamming to be a very hostile act and do not respond well to multiply posted articles. (Yes, there are occasions when the nature of the groups makes posting separately preferable; those occasions are relatively rare and it is _extremely_ unlikely that anyone is justified in posting the same article to as many as three groups.)

Commercial spamming is a double offense because it almost always involves violations of newsgroups charters. There are only a few groups where commercial advertising is acceptable; a FAQ describing them appears periodically in the following newsgroups: alt.online-services, biz.comp.services, biz.misc, alt.internet.services and alt.business.misc. Note that even job offerings should be restricted to appropriate newsgroups.

This is not a complete list of Usenet transgressions, by any means. Repeated instances of postings in violation of newsgroups charters, for instance, may result in our yanking your account as well. Again, you are reminded to become familiar with the Netiquette Guidelines documents in this help system, and to adhere to the standards they suggest.