Usenet FAQ
- From: "\[Anon\] Anon User" <mixminion-nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 06:10:35 +0200
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This is worth reposting
Subject: Usenet FAQ
From: traveler <noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 23:33:04 -0700
Newsgroups: alt.privacy
Message-ID: <40eni19defpnrkrralqpn3hko2po35d25e@xxxxxxx>
Reply-To: noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
A History of Some Usenet Rules
Or - where some conventions and "netiquette" come from and why people
are so religious about it, and why it actually makes some sense...
People that are new to Usenet often wonder about the conventions and
rules for doing things - many of them seem odd and arbitrary and don't
make much sense until you get used to them. Even then they don't make
much sense but at least you get to know what they are. Many are simply
things that have to do with basic politeness or civilized behavior - I
won't go into those here. What I want to talk about are some of the
things that seem unnecessary but have become part of the culture for
historical reasons - and still make sense on some level, but sometimes
don't seem to. I hope this will help explain some of those seemingly
arbitrary rules.
One thing to remember if you are new to Usenet, or even if you aren't
- - when people lay into you for doing something out of order and are
mean about it, they are probably not the expert or the authority that
they claim to be. Most "real" authorities will wait til at least the
second offense to skin you in public over doing something against the
rules, and will point you to the FAQ or send a polite reminder.
Apologize to the group, read the faq, and find out whether your
tormentor is just a self-proclaimed policy cop or the actual founder
of the group before getting into an argument. Even then, arguments
don't do anyone any good. Read the FAQ, lurk and learn for a day or
two, get to know the tone of the group and the real "owner"
contributors before posting.
This discussion is mainly about bandwidth. In the early days of the
Usenet, before it was the Usenet and for a while afterward, bandwidth
was everything - due to the costs associated with moving data around
between systems, and the miniscule amounts of ready-access storage
available. Today, many of the same principles still apply, but for
different reasons - there is so much data available that it's
increasingly difficult to sort it out and find the articles that you
are interested in. The ability to move mountains of data around
casually has resulted in the need to enforce discipline in bandwidth
use much the same as the old technical requirements did, just to keep
newsgroups from becoming garbage bins. Therefore, many of the "Old
Rules" still make sense, but for different reasons - and they are
cherished and enforced by social means rather than physical ones in a
lot of the Usenet newsgroups. Have you ever been "Flamed" for "Top
Posting" and wondered what the Heck they were talking about? Read on.
I've been participating in Usenet for a long time, though I've never
had more than a peripheral involvement, I'm an old timer but not some
sort of Old God Of The Internet or anything. As an observer and long
time lurker, and sometime contributor, then - here are some things
I've picked up over the years.
Almost all of Netiquette grew out of necessity. It became tradition,
and as the older users became less active, the newer users were taught
to do things "the right way" and they passed these traditions along,
and now a vast number of Usenet users know that there are all these
rules, but not why anyone should care about the issues addressed by
the rules.
A lot of the basic forms and conventions come from historical
limitations and mechanics of the system itself. In 1977 I got ahold of
a login to the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) when I attended a
computer science seminar at a school on the east coast. For a while, I
used it to access public bulletin boards on what was, years later, to
become the Usenet that we know and love - using a cuff modem I built
attached to my Timex/Sinclair. Long Distance - from the west coast. I
enjoyed it for a year or so before the login I was using got stripped
off when someone did a cleanup of "unused" accounts.
The bulletin boards were little more than directories of text files
that got copied back and forth to the various machines on the network,
usually by very laborious means, copying the files ("articles") around
from computer to computer by phone lines from systems that were
connected to Arpanet (the government / military / university network
that later became the internet) to systems that were not so fortunate.
I would never have dared to actually post an article. It was extremely
expensive for the system owners - some estimates put the cost of
propigation in those days at nearly a dollar a word once you added up
the computer time and phone charges incurred by all the parties. I was
content to listen in though. The people who posted things were
professors and grad students, on all sorts of odd subjects. I was sure
if I had actually posted anything I would probably have lost the login
I was using to lurk.
Anyway - back to the topic - it was this sheer expense of
transmission, lack of available storage, and difficulty of retrieval
that is the foundation of many of the "rules" of netiquette - based on
a very strong prohibition against wasting bandwidth and storage. At
that time, such waste would have been a capital offense. It would have
been possible to perform a Denial Of Service attack on many of those
systems by simply opening a file and typing until the system storage
was overwhelmed and the system crashed. It happened by accident quite
often - though there were some safeguards to prevent this sort of
thing, by today's standards they were very crude.
In the years that followed, more and more institutions and
organizations got involved. The Arpanet expanded, which made it
possible for more and more systems to participate in BBS/News
communications, and even individual email. Systems with local public
or private networks that were not connected to the Arpanet began
communicating with those that were, by phone line, downloading or
uploading packets of messages at predetermined times. Standards for
these communications began to emerge. As far as Usenet goes, the most
important things to be developed were the NNTP standard (for systems
connected to the Arpanet) and the UUCP standard (for Store-and-Forward
networks of unconnected systems by phone lines or even tape). There
are numerous articles out there about the "Net.Gods" that accomplished
all this, and the emergence of TCP, IP, NNTP, SMTP, UUCP, etc., etc.
that made the modern Internet possible, and the transports now used by
Usenet.
I started paying attention and participating in earnest in the mid
1980's - there were already a lot of people using UUnet back then,
mostly college students and instructors who had access to computers
that were networked into Arpanet or were UUCP points. UUCP was the
main scheme for distributing news at that time. It consisted of a
series of individuals and organizations with resources to spend on it,
that transferred packets of articles in a structured way so that they
could be kept in grouped, threaded form, much like they are now. This
"Store-and-Forward Network" operated over phone lines - each point
would recieve packets of articles, install them into their server on
their local or semi public network, and pass the packet to another
system or systems over the phone line. Starting up a new point would
start you from scratch, unless you could talk a System Operator into
sending you a tape of archives. Almost all colleges and universities
had a UUCP point, and some had public diallup access to a BBS that
exposed it.
At around that time, I had a BBS that I ran out of my living room, and
I learned about a system (called FIDOnet) that was side-hacked into
the UUnet and that I could actually participate in. I carried a few
newsgroups on my BBS. It was fairly expensive as a sysop to
participate - to get and send packets of articles by making long
distance calls (at least we had blazing fast 2400 bps modems and 286
computers to do it with by then). I had to pick and choose groups that
had a high signal-to-noise ratio, not much junk and many interesting
articles for it to be worth doing at all. "comp.*" groups mostly.
The sysops that were actually carrying the "backbone", and
transferring, storing, and accepting posts to large groups, like the
"rec.*" groups, and later the "alt.*" groups, were paying reasonably
large amounts of money to participate. A much larger side-hacked
system than FIDOnet, BITNET, also started up at the time in the same
sort of way but with a lot more traffic, and a proportionately larger
number of "newbies", and non-technical users. The result of these
other networks becoming attached to the UUNet backbone, and major
services like CompuServe also connecting eventually, and the growing
usage of the backbone system at the universities, was that the UUnet
(around that time changing to Usenet) started taking on more and more
traffic, and the traffic was much more social and informal (i.e.
non-important to we geeks) in nature. With so many more users posting
articles, the load on the "backbone" sysops and admins got larger and
larger.
As the traffic increased, The Rules had to be laid down to keep users
from driving the sysops into bankruptcy by abusing their posting
privileges. You often would not be chastised or reprimanded for
breaking The Rules, you would simply be banished. You would not be
able to post any longer. Even the "point" system that you received /
sent articles from could just be taken off the list and no longer
allowed to participate if it originated a lot of frivolous traffic.
The sysops, admins, and moderators who were "paying the postage" had
absolute power over your ability to participate. Keep in mind, a lot
of the traffic was pretty frivolous in nature - newsgroups of jokes,
sweaty-palms discussions of a prurient nature hopefully between
consenting adults, etc. - but the sysops who wanted some channels of
garbage only wanted the exact kind of garbage they were willing to pay
for - no more.
At present, the way the internet works and the sheer volume of people
participating make it hard for any one person to be removed or their
posting privileges revoked. Complaints to your ISP can lose you your
account - but there are a lot of ISPs out there - and most ISPs won't
do anything about behavior complaints, in order to lose your account
you have to be caught posting child pornography or mp3s of copyrighted
recordings. Generally, if you annoy people in a group, they will
simply individually *plonk* you. What this means is that they will set
a killfilter so that any posts from you will not be displayed. If your
offense is egregious enough, they may even notify you that you have
been plonked - pretty insulting, as it means that any reply you make
will go unread - you are "talking to the hand".
The system of UUCP Store and Forward networks was completely replaced
by the internet in about 1989, and many of the rules were no longer
strictly necessary because of the immense increase in bandwidth and
availability of the system. There were still limits though, and the
rules remained as common courtesy rather than absolute law. Today many
even seem silly, with the immense amount of bandwidth available,
binary files well into the hundreds or thousands of megabytes being
posted routinely, and high connection speeds becoming the norm rather
than the exception, even when using modem / phone line connections.
When the rules were laid down, the average connection was with a 2400
bps modem - higher than that was very rare - the low end of the
spectrum now, a 54kbps modem, is 2333% faster.
Along with the relaxation of the technical limitations in bandwidth
however, came such an explosion of content that another kind of
bandwidth - the attention of the users of a newsgroup - became just as
precious. So many of the same rules laid down to protect the data
transfer bandwidth have morphed into rules that prevent newsgroups
from becoming unusable simply because there is too much information to
sort through as it comes in. The attention paid to many of these
conventions varies widely from group to group. As always - Read the
FAQ, Lurk and learn (read posts in the group for a while before
posting), get a feel for the conventions generally agreed on in a
particular group before posting to it.
Basically, The Number One Rule was: "Never post anything that costs
the system bandwidth that isn't budgeted by us for what you want to
do." Here are three most basic of the branches of that Rule that later
branched into many, many Rules of Netiquette:
Thou shalt not post off-topic!
This has been "sub-rule number one" forever. Initially, it was because
sysops that literally paid for the transmission and storage of
newsgroups did not want to pay for articles on a topic other than what
they wanted. Even from the beginning though, it was also a pain for
users who read and participated in the groups to have to download
posts they weren't interested in to sort them out. For a user on a
slow modem, it could take hours to download the messages for an active
group (it was not always possible to be able to download just headers
- - my system allowed it but many didn't) and the downloads of things
like that were often metered - remember back then most people paid by
the minute for connect time - so users had to pay for the unwanted
material against their wishes.
Today, it's just as important. There are so many people posting, that
off-topic posts create a wall of noise between the users that are
looking for articles or conversation about a particular topic and the
information that they are looking for. It's terribly easy to forget -
once you get into a conversational thread that wanders off-topic for
the group you are posting to - but it is everybody's responsibility to
help keep the noise level down. In many groups such free ranging
threads are tolerated or even encouraged - but in others they are not.
Anytime a thread you are involved in starts to veer off topic for the
group - a good rule of thumb is to change the subject line of the
thread to "OT:[subject]" or "Off Topic:[subject]" and offer to resume
the discussion somewhere that it is on topic.
Thou shalt not Cross-post!
There are a couple different ways to crosspost at present - there used
to be just one. And it was Bad. That is, creating a message, and
posting copies of that message to several different groups. With very
little effort, you could create a bandwidth load equal to posting a
hundred messages with one post. Currently, it's possible to cross-post
"properly" with some news client programs, which is to post a message
so that the header shows in more than one newsgroup, but all those
headers point to the same message body. So the mechanics of
crossposting are not as harmful if it's done properly, but still -
there are good reasons to think twice before doing it. First among
these is that it is literally spamming if done to excess, and there's
a fine line between acceptable and excess. Crossposting to a lot of
groups is commonly done by spammers and trolls, so a lot of posts that
are crossposted to many groups are often blocked by good news servers
as well.
A good rule of thumb is that if you are tempted to crosspost a message
to more than 2 groups, you should think hard about whether it's worth
being called potentially a spammer for doing it - or having your post
trashed by a number of servers out of hand. If you are the press
officer for an organization like GreenPeace and you crosspost your
articles to the entire alt.ecology.* tree, that's one thing. If you
just found a TV show that you really like and you crosspost to the
entire alt.tv.* hierarchy, that's kind of another thing... Find the
right audience for your post and put it there and only there. That's
my advice.
Some correlaries along these lines -
Multiple posting -
Posting the same message to the newsgroup over and over because no one
seems to have responded to it - If someone were going to respond, they
would have to the first message. Don't beat a dead horse.
The Billboard post/request -
Posting a message with the same or similar subject line several times
to make a pretty little pattern in the header list. No - you didn't
think of it first. Many, Many people will killfilter you immediately
just so they won't have to look at it. That may seem a little harsh,
but it's one of those things that just starts to annoy you on sight
after the first couple thousand times you've seen it.
Thou shalt not quote!
There are an awful lot of conventions and mini-rules that have grown
out of this, some of them quite subtle and smelling slightly of
anti-newbie bias - and others that have good sound reasons for being
there. Basically, it's the practice of including a previous post or
whole tree of posts in your message, and adding some little comment at
the top (what you'll see in a lot of groups disparaged as
"top-posting") - so that you wind up posting a great huge article just
so you can say "Me, too!" or "Hear, Hear!" or "That was funny!". Early
on, it was a major usage-of-bandwidth problem to have people doing
this. Many of the groups in the early days, especially moderated ones,
had absolute rules against replying to articles at all, because of
this problem. You could lose your posting privileges over it.
The trouble is (and this is where I see anti-newbie bias all the time,
people getting castigated in public for it) that almost everyone who
starts off looking at and posting to Usenet newsgroups does so with
Outlook Express - the out-of-the-box default NewsReader for a vast
majority of the computing public. Outlook Express does this by default
- - Quotes the entire article being replied to, and adds the "new"
message at the top. To keep from doing so requires reconfiguring
Outlook Express. Details on that are addressed in a different article.
If you do need to quote an article that you are replying to in order
to make your point, you really must take the effort to snip out each
point that you address, quote it, and place your reply after it.
Personally, I like simply reading each message in a thread without
having to wade through masses of quoted segments from previous
messages, and I can see why there are rules against quoting - but with
cheap bandwidth, "top-posting" is a pretty forgivable sin.
Rule of thumb - quote as little of previous messages as you need to in
order to provide context for your comments. If it's not necessary,
don't quote at all.
Some correlaries along these lines -
In Binaries - The The "Here's What I Have" post -
This really is a deadly sin. It will make people passionately hate or
despise you. You will be ignored by everyone who seriously posts to
the group. Every time I see one of these that actually gets the fills
posted I cringe, because I know that others will see it having worked
and will do it themselves. Here's the scenario: (L)user A downloads
part of a binary file and can't complete all of the segments necessary
to complete the file which was posted as a segmented archive (set of
RAR or mp3 files, etc.). (L)user A then reposts everything that they
did manage to get, with a note (especially irritating if it's in a 0
file or other file, not in the subject of all the posts) saying,
"Here's part 01 through part 23 of 'X', someone please upload the
missing parts"...
Everyone who downloads their post without realizing it's incomplete,
now becomes an ally in persuading someone to post the fills necessary
to complete the fileset. This is really abhorrent behavior. You should
Never, Ever, start a binary post that you know you cannot complete. An
exception is if someone else requests a part or parts that you have,
it would be perfectly OK to repost the requested parts, with a subject
something like "Here's the part 12 and 19 you requested, can you or
anyone else please post parts 24-29?".
There are many other examples of this sort of abuse. Examine what you
are going to do and why before posting anything. Ask yourself, "Am I
contributing, or just coercing someone else into giving?"
The Bottom Line -
Read a lot of newsgroups before you post to any. Read a lot of FAQs
before you start to post. There's a vast wasteland of garbage out
there, and diamonds sparkling amongst it - pay attention to how the
system works, and make your contributions to it diamonds instead of
garbage. It will make the whole thing better for all of us!
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