Welcome to ABCDI. This group is a place where you may acquire EXACT
copies of commercially available software and games for the sole
purpose of evaluation. The software industry currently does not
support the concept of returns and yet consistently turns out $70
games that aren't worth $7 and $300 applications that fail to work as
advertised due to bugs, incompetence, or intent. This group provides a
means to really test out games and applications to see if they're
suitable - if they are we expect you to purchase them. The software
developers can't make more if they don't get paid for their latest
releases, after all.
Now, as you might guess, supplying complete copies of current games
and/or applications requires a huge amount of time, effort, and
bandwidth. These CDs hold roughly 600MB each and some games or apps
use multiple CDs. Simply going nuts and posting everything we had
would very quickly get the group canceled as we totally overwhelm the
ability of the Usenet servers to cope with the storage requirements.
As you may or may not be aware, Usenet servers are constantly fighting
to improve their ability to hold more articles for longer periods of
time, but it is not an easy or inexpensive thing to do. This group
alone already (as of the last check) accounts for roughly 15% of total
traffic for the entire Usenet hierarchy. As such, we are certainly in
the crosshairs of news administrators around the world as a prime
culprit of their rising costs.
To date we have managed to be grudgingly accepted in part because
of the order that has been instilled in the group since its inception
in the middle of 1997. A group of very experienced Usenet veterans
formed the group and spent a number of days hashing out how best to
control the new group so that it would be permitted to live. Most, if
not all, had become fed up with the way alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc had
changed into a cesspool of requests (REQs), endless reposts of the
same program, and non-stop chatter. That group had, in the opinion of
these folks, become more useless than useful. They resolved to not let
that happen here.
This FAQ is the result of those days of chats, email, phone
discussions, etc. It is not law, of course, since the alt hierarchy is
not moderated or controlled in any official manner, but to the
founding members and those that have become valued contributors,
mentors, tech support, humor (intentional or not), and quiet
acquirers, it is the structure that has allowed them to test drive
many applications in a sane, organized manner. They tend to take
unkindly to those that come in with the sole intention of disrupting
the group and may sometimes be more aggressive in its defense than you
feel is warranted. Please consider, however, that they have seen many,
many people come in questioning the way the group works, wanting to
ignore the rules if they appear inconvenient or arbitrary, and in
general care less about the regular members of the group.
So, how do you fit in without ticking off people? Simple.
First, read this FAQ all the way through. Bookmark the site or
print a copy out and study the areas that you do not understand at
first glance. The FAQ is considered (amongst the Warez groups) to be
one of the best of its kind and has served as the model for at least
one other group. It will attempt to answer all of the most common
questions people have about acquiring, testing, and burning CD images,
and even describes the way to create your own images for posting
should you decide to go that route. It is not perfect and will likely
never be, but it is awfully good.
Second, try to figure out things on your own first, then ask
questions about what you still have problems on. Few people will be
irritated at a new member asking a question after they've studied the
FAQ and made an attempt at working out their problem themselves. Ask
your question in the appropriate place, alt.binaries.cd.image.tools.d,
and include as much information as you can about your problem. The
people in this group cover an exceptionally wide range of skills and
talents and should be able to answer most questions you can come up
with.
Finally, please consider yourself on probation, as it were, when
you first post here. We have no idea of your age, sex, experience,
race, nothing. The only impression we have is what you say and what
you do. An initial flurry of "to hell with all you idiots, help
me now, dammit!" will encourage many to either ignore anything
you have to say from now on, laugh wildly at you, or flame you
mercilessly until you change or go away. We'd all be better off if you
came in and acted politely. You'll get your help and maybe even future
favors - few people help those they don't like <g>.
Now, back to the FAQ. The sections are grouped according to topics,
dealing with the basic questions people tend to have, issues related
to getting the images to their machines, recreating them correctly
once there, burning the image to a blank CD, and for those willing to
go to the effort to make and post their own images, there are sections
on making an image and posting a CD. Finally, there is a glossary of
some of the common terms you'll see as you follow ABCDI. If there are
areas within that are vague or not helpful enough, let us know your
views in the discussion group and we'll take your comments under
advisement.
