# Usenet Etiquette ("Netiquette")

The ease of posting Usenet News articles causes many inappropriate articles to be sent to the network. An article can be inappropriate if it:

-- Is devoid of useful information or ideas.
-- Is sent to inappropriate newsgroup(s).
-- Is Sent to too many newsgroup(s)
-- Contains rude or insulting remarks.
-- Is really intended for a particular individual, rather than the entire Usenet community.

Please compose your articles thoughtfully. Consider sending an electronic mail message rather than posting an article, if appropriate.

Be aware of the fact that some sites must pay long-distance telephone charges to receive your article. Also be aware of the fact that some of the popular newsgroups have tens of thousands of readers. 10,000 people each reading your article for 20 seconds spend a total of 55 hours reading your article.

At the end of most articles there is usually a small blurb called a signature or sig. This usually comes from a file in the person's login directory and is appended automatically to the message by the news reader. Some people get carried away with their signature and place complex ASCII drawings or cute sayings at the bottom of their messages. These signatures bother most people and it is considered poor "netiquette" to have signatures larger than about 4 lines. You can create a signature file of your own using any Windows Editor and then attach it to WinVN using the option Config Signature File on the Config menu. Please remember to save your signature file as plain ASCII text, since vendor dependent binary files (such as Microsoft Word files) are not portable across the entire Internet community.

Many new users wish to test their ability to post before they actually say anything of any interest to anyone. Don't post test type messages to an active newsgroup. This will interrupt quite a number of people and is considered poor "netiquette". There are usually a number of "Test" newsgroups (they usually have the word "TEST" in their name) that can be used to verify that posting from your host will be successful. Some test newsgroups (like ALT.TEST) have automatic E-Mail responding software. A post to those groups will cause electronic mail from all over the world to be sent back to you as your post gets forwarded from site to site.

The "Newsgroups:" field in a composition window isn't limited to just one group. If a note makes sense to more than one area you can cross-post it to other newsgroups by just separating the newsgroups with a comma in the Newsgroups field. It is considered poor "netiquette" to cross-post to more than three or four newsgroups.

When posting new articles to News, please remember that News runs on many different hosts and operating systems. In fact, since WinVN is one of the very few News readers for Microsoft Windows, the majority of posts from the Usenet are viewed by people running non-DOS/Windows operating systems. Inserting graphics or non ASCII text (such as different fonts, underlining, color changes etc.) in an article will appear as unintelligible garbage to almost everyone else. You can use WinVN to send binary attachments along with your post but exercise judgment and don't flood the Usenet with massive binary attachments.

When responding to articles, use the Follow-up Article option instead of the New Post option. This will maintain a reference link between your message and the article you were reading at the time of your posting. People reading your message from other "thread based" news readers, like WinVN, will be able to understand how your message fits into the rest of the conversation. WinVN will automatically "quote" the text of the article you were reading (including a unique Message ID that can be used to locate the original posting) and insert it at the beginning of your post. Intersperse your comments between the quoted text and delete any large quoted sections that do not pertain to your response. Someone can always find the original text by clicking on the unique Message ID. Also, use Message ID's when referring to other articles and never refer to another article by it's article number. Article Numbers are never the same from system to system so only people reading news on your own local system will know to which article you are referring.

Try to keep your text in a generic format. Many (if not most) of the people reading Usenet do so from 80 column terminals or from workstations with 80 column terminal windows. Try to keep your lines of text to less than 80 characters for optimal readability. If people quote part of your article in a follow-up, each line gets indented a few characters and gets proceeded with a ">". Thus, standard lines of 75 characters or less are best for later readability. Also, WinVN allows you to change your viewing font to any font your workstation supports. Be careful when using proportional style fonts since they allow you to place more characters per line than fixed style fonts.

Most news readers on the Usenet are running on multi-user hosts with system administrators and operating systems that validate logons. Unfortunately, WinVN runs under MS-DOS which is a single user operating system that doesn't have any concept of a logon. (WinVN also runs under Windows/NT which does validate logon's.) Please take special care in configuring your Personal Info and insure that your name and mailing address are valid. Since most MS-DOS machines cannot receive Internet mail, don't specify your MS-DOS host as your mail address.

See Posting an Article and Mailing a Message.