Usenet began as, and largely remains, a co-operative and liberal forum, with few absolute rules. However, there are some guidelines that have evolved over the years with the intent of setting common standards and making life easy for users.
If you break these guidelines/rules, in general no-one will come down on you like a ton of bricks to start with (though you may gently be pointed in the right direction). However, if you continue to ignore or flout these rules, you may find the following starting to happen:
everyone will just ignore you
other posters will concentrate on the format of your posts rather than the content
you will be well and truly flamed
you may be reported to your ISP, and you could lose your account
While the last may be unlikely except in extreme circumstances, at the very least it will make discussions on the newsgroups more enjoyable for everyone if you follow the guidelines below. You will also find people taking more notice of what you write.
When they were created, both newsgroups were given charters:
In the event of any contradiction between the charters and these FAQs, the charters take precedence.
At this point it is probably worth making the distinction between abuse on the net and abuse of the net. The latter (using the net to post large, inappropriate, forged or repeated messages) is generally considered a more serious problem, if only because bandwidth is limited and also most of us have to pay phone charges to download messages. This is why "binary posts" are specifically prohibited in the charters.
In simple terms, anything which can't be read with a text editor (Notepad for Windows, for example) without displaying gibberish. Binaries include graphics files, pictures, spreadsheets, program files, and HTML-formatted posts (about which more below). They take up a lot of bandwidth, can be totally unintelligible to some programs, may contain computer viruses or worms, and should not be posted to the SAFC newsgroups under any circumstances.
If you have a picture or sound file which you think others may be interested in, you can post it in alt.binaries.soccer and tell the SAFC newsgroups it's there, or use some of the shedloads of free webspace which is now available. Some of the regular contributors run their own SAFC websites, and may be willing to help you find a home for a good picture or sound file if you ask for advice/help.
Oh, and posting binaries to text-only newsgroups is probably as good a way as any of getting your Internet account terminated.
HTML-formatted posts can look wonderful when you create them, but when they come out at the other end as gibberish it rather ruins the effect, and wastes your and everyone else's time and money. Usenet is a plain-text medium, and HTML codes increase the size of a post significantly and hide the content among all the markup language. Always post in plain text, and if you are using Outlook Express or Netscape Communicator check your settings to make sure you are also replying in plain text.
Netscape and Outlook Express also have an incredibly annoying feature called v-cards, personal business cards, which are totally unnecessary on Usenet. Again, please check your settings to make sure you are not inflicting them on everyone, and bear in mind that as Usenet is an open worldwide forum you would be publishing your personal contact details to an unknown audience.
ASCII art - i.e. pictures made out of text on the screen - are completely pointless, not least as everyone uses different font sizes and settings. Don't do it - apart from anything else, ASCII pictures were last in fashion about 25 years ago when Snoopy was considered cool.
No. There are other "rules", though these are not included in the charters as they are universal to all newsgroups. In summary, they are as follows:
Please reply after the text of the previous message. This helps others to see quickly what it is you are responding to, and is done for the simple reason that humans read from top to bottom. If you are replying to a long message, post your comments after the sentence(s) in question, and delete the parts to which you are not replying.
Please snip the text of the previous message, leaving just enough to allow others to know what you are talking about, but not so much that you are posting 50 lines just to say "I agree". Also, as messages can sometimes be delayed or go missing from a thread, leaving some previous text helps others to know what it is you are replying to.
Please don't post in capitals. This is difficult to read, and is interpreted as shouting. If you want to emphasise something, use *this* or /this/ for bold, and _this_ for underlining.
Please trim signatures out of replies (some newsreaders can do this automagically - see below).
Please reply outside the quoted text, on a new line (i.e. not next to the ">" symbols); some newsreaders put quoted text in a different colour, so it could look as if you aren't saying anything new.
Please reply to the right message. People can get very annoyed if they are misquoted.
Please remember that Usenet is not always an "instant" medium, and posts may not always propagate to all servers straight away: someone may not have replied to your post for the simple reason that it hasn't got to them yet.
Please also bear in mind that, while we've said "please" here, if you keep on ignoring these simple netiquette guidelines others may not be quite so polite in future, and you may well get flamed to a crisp.
For further hints on how to post correctly, con everyone else into thinking you have been on Usenet for years, give you a feeling of moral superiority when flaming others, and make you incredibly attractive to men / women / wildebeests, have a look at the following:
| www.usenet.org.uk/ukpost.html |
| www.star-one.org.uk/computer/format.htm |
| etiquette.net |
| www.albion.com/netiquette/corerules.html |
The newsgroup news.announce.newusers used to be recommended as a source of information for new Usenet users, however this newsgroup has had few postings for at least a year. Instead, we would recommend news.newusers.questions, which contains several good regularly posted articles about Usenet, and will also answer general questions about how to get the most out of newsgroups.
We would also recommend that new Usenet users should spend some time "lurking" (reading posts without posting), to get a feel for the groups.
You may have noticed some people have signatures after their messages, prefixed by a line with two dashes and a space. Signatures are intended to tell others something about you, how to contact you or find your website, and sometimes a short but relevant quote.
Signatures should be no longer than 4 lines, and if prefixed by the magic two dashes and a space will be automatically be removed from replies by good newsreaders (but not by Outlook Express).
However, long or abusive signatures are not acceptable; this takes us neatly from abuse of the net to abuse on the net.
From time to time threads will degenerate into arguments about inalienable rights to say what you want, where you want, and in whatever colourful language you choose. You may want to bear a few things in mind before exercising your "right to free speech", if there is such a thing.
Firstly, messages posted on Usenet can be very difficult to cancel afterwards. Many ISPs no longer honour cancel messages, so you should always assume that anything you send will propagate across the globe as fast as a very fast thing and may well come back to haunt you at a later date. Usenet messages are also archived in databases at Dejanews (and elsewhere) for posterity.
Also, words written down can look very different from the same spoken; smileys can help indicate that you are being humorous, but should not be abused to cover up a violent attack on another poster. If you think you may be being controversial, try taking 30 seconds to think whether you really want the words you have typed to go against your name for all eternity.
Another 30 seconds to consider whether what you have just typed could be safely said face-to-face at closing time to a six foot skinhead built like a brick netty should help you make your mind up.
Please also bear in mind that not everyone reading (or posting to) this newsgroup has English as their first language. Even if they do, criticising others' spelling or grammar is generally regarded as a particularly lame and juvenile activity.
Many people think that changing their address on the options menu of their newsreader makes them untraceable. This is a common misconception, which many people have found out to their cost. News posts are traceable back to your ISP, who can then work out who sent it.
So if you are thinking of being abusive and posting sick comments in an attempt to shock or anger people ("trolling") or to stir up dissent, and that because you have changed your name no one will catch you, think again. Your account can be restricted or even withdrawn and you could even be barred by other ISPs.
Do not respond to inflammatory material - that is what the person who originally posted it wants to see. There are people on Usenet who take a perverse delight in trying to disrupt other newsgroups, and they occasionally descend on the SAFC newsgroups (as they do on most groups). Alternatively, the "hard lad" calling you all sorts of vile names is quite likely an 11-year old who has got onto his/her parents' computer during the school holidays.
In both cases, the best course of action is just to ignore the messages concerned and/or killfile the posters.
What you decide to call yourself on Usenet is, of course, entirely up to you. There are perfectly valid reasons for wanting to remain anonymous on Usenet (though not all of these will apply to the SAFC newsgroups), and equally valid reasons for being prepared to put your name to your views and opinions. However, please don't change your name (or "handle") all the time, and don't invent other identities (or sockpuppets) to support your point of view.
You may see posts saying that you can make a lot of money by sending a small amount of money to various people and then adding your name to the list etc, etc. Don't believe what this guy tells you and most definitely don't send any money off to anyone.
Requests to pass your e-mail address on to someone for a "make money" scheme will almost inevitably result in your receiving large quantities of unsolicited e-mail (colloquially known as spam).
Quite possibly, but probably not as much now as a couple of years ago. Some newsgroups are much worse than others for attracting the attention of the spambots, and while the SAFC newsgroups seem comparatively trouble-free (the uk.* group attracts less attention than the alt.* group), it may be better to take some simple precautions.
Firstly, try not to make your e-mail address obvious when posting to Usenet. Most spambots collect e-mail addresses from the "From" headers, so changing (munging) your "From" address to make it invalid will eliminate most spam. Have a look at others' techniques to see what they do; inserting ".invalid" at the end of the address is a common method.
You should never use someone else's e-mail address, or an address you have just made up. A lot of ISPs and news providers require that you use your valid e-mail address; besides, all you are doing by using another e-mail address (even if you think it's not a currently used one) is diverting spam to another account either now or in the future.
Replying to spam is the ideal way of letting the spammer know that they have reached a valid e-mail address, so don't. For more about how to fight spam/UCE, see www.euro.cauce.org
Crossposting is posting the same message to more than one group. For example, you might post an article about Sunderland AFC to both alt.sports.soccer.sunderland and uk.sport.football.clubs.sunderland as it will be relevant to both groups.
Crossposting can be open to abuse. Please do not crosspost your article to every group with "football" or "soccer" in the name, as it cannot possibly be relevant to everyone, and some of the smaller groups get swamped with what is to them off-topic rubbish.
When replying to a post, remember to look at what groups your reply will be going to, delete from the newsgroups line any groups that the post does not belong in and indicate in the reply that you have trimmed. Good newsreaders will indicate if your reply will be crossposted, and give you the option to restrict your follow-up post to certain newsgroups only (if you do so, it is customary to say in your post that you have changed this).
Beware of replying to anything crossposted to any of the numerous American Football (Gridiron) groups, as there is a small minority of troublemakers who inhabit these groups who seem to delight in causing as much disruption as possible by attempting inter - group flame wars about what "proper" football is and how America won World War 2. These flame wars erupt in most UK football newsgroups on a tediously regular basis, and are best left well alone.
There are other newsgroups which are used by trolls as a base from which to disrupt other newsgroups; if in doubt, the best course of action is to either ignore the thread completely or restrict any follow-up to the SAFC group(s) only.
Please also remember that cross-posting, if really felt necessary, should be done by one message posted to all the relevant groups, and not by repeating the same message in different posts to different groups. The latter is known as multi-posting, wastes bandwidth and is very unwelcome.
Nothing can start a flame war quicker than comments about whether someone is a 'real' fan. Whether old or young, long-time supporters or recent converts, residents of Sunderland or Singapore, Pennywell or Pennsylvania, all Sunderland fans are welcome to the group.
Even if you don't personally agree with someone's views about the last win/defeat, there is no need for personal abuse. Remember, you don't always know the full story behind a person's love for the team. It may be that they were born 100 yards from Roker Park or The Stadium of Light, have supported the club for 40 years but moved out of the area to work or retire. Take a moment to think before you flame someone for not going to every match; there is probably a valid reason.
Football is undoubtedly appealing to young children. You only have to look at the number of kids at the Stadium of Light or wearing Sunderland strips for a kickabout to realise this.
The SAFC newsgroups are not specifically child oriented. In view of the adult nature of some of the content, we would recommend that parents of children below the age of 12 do not allow them to read this group unsupervised; over this age they will probably be hearing something similar in the playground anyway.
Before you allow children to read them, it may be a good idea to download all of the day's posts for offline reading and go through them, deleting any you find objectionable.
This section is here to help you understand the abbreviations and jargon used within this group. Many news-posters will shorten things when they are posting. It's not a secret code, or at least, that's not the intention! To prove it, the next sections list some of the common phrases you will find, and what they mean.
| AFAICS | As Far As I Can See |
| AFAIK | As Far As I Know |
| AICMFP | And I Claim My Five Pounds |
| AIUI | As I Understand It |
| AOLer | Specifically a user of America On Line, more generally a term of abuse for someone who quotes a whole message just to say "i agree" or "u suck" |
| ASCII | American Standard Code for Information Interchange |
| BTW | By The Way |
| FOAD | Go Away and Expire (or something like that) |
| FAQ | A document that no-one ever reads, but which is constantly quoted |
| Flame | An angry or abusive response, which can degenerate into a flame war when others join in |
| FWIW | For What It's Worth |
| Godwin's Law | Invoked whenever someone uses Nazis or Hitler to support their point of view. Godwin's law says that at this point rational discussion cannot continue and that the thread must be stopped. |
| HAND | Have A Nice Day |
| HTH | Hope This Helps |
| HTML | HyperText Markup Language (used on web pages, not Usenet) |
| IANAL | I Am Not A Lawyer |
| IIRC | If I Recall Correctly |
| IIWY | If I Were You |
| IMO | In My Opinion |
| IMHO | In My Humble Opinion. |
| IMNSHO | In My Not So Humble Opinion |
| IRC | Internet Relay Chat |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider |
| ISTR | I Seem To Recall |
| ISWYM | I See What You Mean |
| ITYF | I Think You'll Find |
| IOUNOD | It's Only Usenet; No-one Dies |
| JOOI | Just Out Of Interest |
| LOL | Laughs/Laughing Out loud |
| Merkin | UK Usenet term for a citizen of the USA |
| Newbie | Someone new to the internet |
| <plonk> | Used to indicate that you have put someone in your killfile |
| POV | Point Of View |
| ROTFLMAO | Rolling on the floor laughing my arms off |
| ROTFLMBO | Rolling on the floor laughing my bits off |
| ROT13 | A scheme for encoding text so that it cannot be read without first being decoded. |
| Sock Puppet | Another identity used by the same person in a vain attempt to show support for an unpopular point of view "Look, Sooty agrees with me, don't you, Sooty?" |
| Spam | Postings (generally but not always adverts) posted across a large number of unrelated newsgroups (from the Monty Python sketch where no matter what you want, you always get spam) |
| Spambot | An automated program that trawls through newsgroups collecting e-mail addresses |
| TIA | Thanks In Advance |
| TBH | To Be Honest |
| Troll | Someone who posts something controversial just to get an angry response rather than have a discussion |
| TVM | Thanks Very Much |
| UCE | Unsolicited Commercial E-mail |
| ALS | A Love Supreme (An SAFC fanzine) |
| Barcodes | Derogatory term for Newcastle United fans |
| Father Jack | Bobby Saxton |
| FoD | Fortress of Darkness |
| FTM | Fuck The Mags |
| Geordie | A person from Newcastle, also applies to the team. |
| ITHICS | It's The Hope I Can't Stand (An SAFC fanzine). |
| Mackem | A person from Sunderland/Wearside |
| Mags | Derogatory term for Newcastle fans |
| Netty | A toilet |
| NUFC | Newcastle United Football club. |
| RTG | Ready To Go (a popular SAFC website) |
| SAFC | Sunderland Association Football Club. |
| S&C | Sex and Chocolate (An SAFC fanzine). |
| Skunks | Our black-and-white friends from up the road |
| Smoggies | Derogatory term for Middlesbrough Fans. |
| SOL | Sunderland Stadium of Light. |
| TGB | Thick Geordie Bastard |
| Toon | A fictional, two-dimensional cartoon character invented by the Warner Brothers |
| TTFKAM | The Twat Formerly Known as Magic (Allan Johnston) |
| TWR | The Wearside Roar (An SAFC fanzine) |
This section is all about emoticons or smileys, the little :-)'s you put at the end of a sentence to modify the meaning of what you have said, or so that people can see you were joking or being sarcastic or whatever. However, you must remember that if you violently insult or abuse someone and try to excuse this by putting a smiley after it, this will not make what you said acceptable.
This is what we have so far - any additions would be appreciated.
| :-) | Your basic smiley. This smiley is used to inflect a sarcastic or joking statement since we can't hear voice inflection over the internet. |
| :o) | surprised smiley, used to indicate amazement or shock |
| ;-) | Winky smiley. User just made a flirtatious and/or sarcastic remark. More of a "don't hit me for what I just said" smiley. |
| :-( | Frowning smiley. User did not like that last statement or is upset or depressed about something. |
| :o( | Sadder than :-( |
| :-I | Indifferent smiley. Better than a :-( but not quite as good as a :-). |
| :-> | User just made a really biting sarcastic remark. Worse than a ;-). |
| > :-> | User just made a really devilish remark. |
| > ;-> | Winky and devil combined. A very lewd remark was just made. |
| :-P | Stick tongue out. Used when gloating or in "My-team's-better-than-yours" arguments, though often light-heartedly. |
| ;) | smug smiley |
A kill file is a list of subjects or addresses you really don't want to read, so your news software deletes it before you download it. Most newsreaders support killfiles, with the best allowing great flexibility in who/what you killfile on a temporary or regular basis.
You may find, for example, that someone is becoming particularly annoying and is disrupting your enjoyment of the newsgroups. Rather than have to bite your tongue and not reply every time, wouldn't it be better just to let your newsreader delete all their posts so that you can concentrate on the many intelligent, erudite contributions instead.
You may need to experiment, as some trolls delight in changing their details (morphing) in a vain attempt to stay out of killfiles. If you can't block them based on their name or e-mail address, try looking at the version of newsreader they use, or their ISP.
Although <plonk> is used to indicate to someone that you're putting them in your killfile, you may find that doing this incites the other party to further abuse. Replying to someone you say you've already killfiled does make you look particularly lame.
Which newsreader and operating system you use is, of course, entirely up to you. We would however respectfully suggest that if you are using Outlook Express (OE) you look a little bit further, including the following programs.
This is not just because OE is a non-compliant newsreader in its defaults and actions (e.g. defaulting to HTML, no proper control of line lengths, not posting signatures properly and no real killfile), but also as you will find that the properly designed programs below will make your newsgroup reading and posting much, much easier. Probably the best that can be said about OE (colloquially known as Outhouse Depressed) is that it's free, and you get exactly what you pay for.
Here are a number of news programs with kill-file capabilities:
tin, Rn, GRn, slrn, Newscoaster, ADMaN, Microdot, mNews, Worldnews, NewsPro. YAM and Thor, which are at heart email progs can also deal with news.
Like all Amiga software the best source is Aminet, in this case the comm/news directory. There are a fair few Aminet mirrors around the world, such as ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/aminet. The README file from the root dir lists most other mirrors, the INDEX file in that dir has a complete list of everything on the site, e.g. slrn.lha comm/news 661K 77+Slrn - An easy to use NNTP based newsreader
MacSOUP. (Available from all good shareware sites.)
| Agent | www.forteinc.com |
| Gravity | www.microplanet.com |
|
News Xpress |
www.malch.com/nxfaq.html |
|
Turnpike |
www.turnpike.com |
|
nFilter |
www.nfilter.org is a good program which can be used to filter news and killfile on many different criteria |
Agent and Turnpike also have their own Usenet newsgroups where you can get unofficial advice and help.
slrn and tin; also Forte Agent runs under Wine and VMware. Oh, look, if you're running Linux or one of the many flavours of Unix, you don't really need us to advise you on software, do you?
No, there are two other sections.
If you have any additions to or comments on the above, then please mail us at the usual address so that we can consider adding them to the FAQ.