Posting Guidelines

The following will be referred to the sender's ISP with a request for disciplinary action.

• Forged approvals
• Large binary attachments - PGP signatures are specifically exempted.
• ANSI bombs, viruses, similar destructive code.
• Cascades (aka "Performance Art" or "Poetry Contests")
• Excessive multi-posting - "SPAM" in the strict sense, defined in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet as Briedbart Index >= 20.

Netiquette Issues / Common Problems

The following will generally be rejected:

• Small binary attachments - PGP signatures are the only exception. Vcards and S/MIME signatures are NOT accepted. (The MIME "Content-type: multi-part" header will trigger automatic rejection.)

• Personalities and Epithets - Address the post, not the poster.

• Inappropriate Venue - Would you advertise a used car for sale in Bayonne, New Jersey on a group that is carried in São Paulo, Brasil? Only if you're a spammer who doesn't care that you're wasting other people's time and money. This group has a worldwide audience; please use it accordingly.

• Charter Violations - The above is the main reason we don't accept job postings; they are inherently local. It's also in the charter: We will not run résumés or head-hunter ads. You are expected to read the charter before you submit a post.

• "The Dog Ate My Homework" - We're not here to do your schoolwork, whether you're a ten-year-old or a PhD candidate. Not even if you're both. If you want to write the definitive history of Y2k, check back with us in 2002; most of the dust will have settled then, one way of another. Until then, we've got work to do.

• Transparent lies - for example, fred@Y2KWombat.com posts: "Has anyone tried Y2K Wombat? I just did, and I think it's nifty!" Please don't waste the group's resources on a post whose only possible response is "Who do you think you're fooling?!"

  We do accept ads and press releases from companies. They must be honest about the relationship between the poster and the product, and they must convey technical information suitable for an audience of working, professional programmer/analysts.

• Quoting Headers - Unless you are reporting net-abuse to an ISP, there is no reason to quote headers.

• Grossly Excessive Signatures - The global Usenet standard is four lines. Citations of the Uniform Commercial Code, complete song lyrics, site ads that are consistently longer than the posts they accompany, ASCII "art," etc. are not welcome.

• Grossly Excessive Quoting - Quoting a entire post of more than a full standard screen, without any visible attempt to trim or insert comments. Adding less than three new lines after quoting a screenful or more. "Me Too" posts in general.

• Test Messages - If you have something to say, say it. You don't need to blow into the microphone first. Refer posting problems to the moderator. If you can't receive the group, you need to contact your own service provider.

• SHOUTING AN ENTIRE POST - The Caps Lock key is on the left side of your keyboard somewhere. Turn it off!

• Excessive Crossposting - c.s.y2k.tech will not accept posts that hit more than three other groups* or groups in alt. (David Lawrence, the moderator of news.announce.newgroups, has a blanket exception for administrative posts such as RFD's and CFV's.) We will not approve posts that would also impact another moderated group, and we expect other moderators to show us the same courtesy. (*was two; changed 3 Nov 1998)

• Subject Trickery - Using whitespace, leading punctuation, meaningless decorations, or similar tricks to make your Subject stand out is rude to everyone else who reads the group.

• [Mis]use of HTML - Usenet is not the Web. If your browser posts only in HTML, it's broken. If it repeats every post in text and HTML both, it's broken. Usenet is a plain text medium. You are welcome to post URLs but please explain WHY you think they are worth visiting.

• Gross Rudeness - "Please respond by email because I don't read this group" is a gratuitous insult. Note that this is not the same as asking for a courtesy copy (CC:) nor is it the same as offering to summarize replies for the benefit of the group. It's the part about "not reading the group" that is rude.

• Non-Latin Characters - Do not use 8-bit ASCII (in headers) or Quoted-Printable (in headers). Our charter states that we do not require the use of English, but it should be possible to read your Subject line in 7-bit Latin (Roman) characters.

The following MAY be returned to you for correction:

• Naked URLs / Empty Posts - No, we don't want you to post your entire Web page (see above -- posts written in HTML will be rejected). Posting a URL is much better, but please tell us why you are doing it! Why should we go there? Your Subject line may be chopped off in transit, so don't assume that it tells the story. Saying "See subject line" will leave many readers frustrated.

• Attributions and Nested Quotes - Please be sure that your newsreader properly nests quotes so that it is clear who is quoting whom.

  <<You should be aware that the "Russian" or "AOL-style" quoting used around this paragraph is not standard. We allow it, but we don't like it.>>

  It works better to quote someone and then reply, rather than replying and then quoting. If you can't get to your point in the first screen, though, a line or two at the very start of your post can be useful as an overview.

• No Context in a Followup - The flip side of Excessive Quoting. There is no guarantee two articles will reach any given site in chronological order. Can we understand the point you're trying to make? Why are you posting this followup? To whom are you responding?

• Surveys - Ask for email replies and offer to summarize the results as a single post. Don't post followups when the poster asked for email. (A "reply" is email. A "followup" goes to the group.)

• Line Wrap - If your post is broken into alternating long and short
  lines on a standard
  80-column terminal, it is annoying at best. If it goes on for very long,
  it becomes not merely
  annoying but utterly unreadable. Use a fixed width font and keep your line lengths below 78 characters. (74 is even better, since it allows one or two followup posters to quote you.)

• Vapid Subject Lines - If the subject of your post is "please help" or "Year 2000," what have you told the group? Give us a subject line with some information in it! It helps us to help you.

• Quoting Signatures - The only signature we should see is yours.*

Am I an anal-retentive son of a bitch? Maybe. If you've ever supported an offline newsreader for the blind, you can call me anything you like.

*To make it easy to handle signatures, you SHOULD use the standard (So-RFC1036) signature delimiter in your own posts and emails. It's a SHOULD, not a MUST, meaning I won't reject any post just because it doesn't have a valid sigdash, but if you do use one and your post has an unrelated problem, I'll feel more forgiving. (Hint, hint!)

What's a sigdash? It's just two hyphens, one space, and a hard return. It looks like this:
--
A signature is your name and your email address, not your life story.
Kevin Martin <cannon@nic.com>