USENET Etiquette

• Read news.announce.newusers before you start posting messages. This newsgroup will fill you in on the history of the usenet, some of the newsgroups that are available, and the rules of etiquette. Most of the items mentioned below are explained there.

• Quote as little as possible from others' messages. This is the only major deviation between mail etiquette and news etiquette. Your news message may be sent to thousands of other sites. Most of these sites keep anywhere from several days to several weeks' worth of old news articles. This means that the article you are replying to is probably available, if someone needs to look at it. In particular, "me too" messages, where you quote several dozen lines from someone else's news article, and then add a one-line comment at the end are frowned upon. Make sure that all the quoted text is absolutely necessary.

• Before you ask a question, you should check to see if that question has been asked in the recent past, and if it has been answered. Many newsgroups have postings that show up once a month or son and provide answers to frequently- asked questions.

• Use appropriate newsgroups. In general, read a newsgroup for a little while to get a feel for what it is about and what is appropriate to discuss there. The purpose of some groups is not immediately obvious from the name.

• Appropriate content for a newsgroup may depend on whether or not there are other newsgroups that would be more appropriate. It is appropriate to post a "For Sale" message selling a set of golf clubs to the newsgroup misc.forsale. However, a message offering your IBM PC up for sale is not appropriate in misc.forsale, because there is a more appropriate group: misc.forsale.computers.

• Use appropriate distributions. When you are posting with Pnews, you choose one of seven different distribution levels. The distributions range from only making your article available within the department, to making it available to anyone in the state, to sending it out to the whole world. "For sale" messages are again excellent examples; people in France are not likely to want to buy your car.

• Do no post the same message several times. If you think there was a problem with the message such that it did not get posted, wait a few minutes and check to see if your message shows up in rn. If you do not think your messages are getting to other sites, talk to the operators about it, rather than posting the same message again.

• Do not post copyrighted materials.

• Follow the rules of the group you are sending to. Some groups have some rules of thumb to make life easier for the people reading the group. Again, reading a group for awhile before posting is a good idea.

• Reply to other people's articles by mail unless there is a specific reason to do otherwise.

• ".signature" files at the end of email and rn messages should be no longer than four lines.

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