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- Path: fc.hp.com!kevm
- From: kevm@fc.hp.com (Kevin Melsheimer)
- Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions,alt.society.futures,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.rexx,comp.lang.perl,comp.lsi,alt.rv,alt.rmgroup,alt.pegan,alt.pantyhose,alt.overlords,alt.oobe,alt.magic,alt.music.alternative,alt.music,alt.games.mk,alt.games.sf2,alt.games.lynx,alt.food,alt.flame,alt.fan.q,alt.evil,alt.exotic.music,alt.config,alt.crackers,alt.coupons,alt.beer,alt.bbs,alt.bbs.ads,alt.bbs.doors,alt.3d,alt.1d
- Subject: Re: FREE Songs For Your IBM compatible PC, just e-mail me to get them, such as theme songs like Jurrassic park....
- Followup-To: news.newusers.questions,alt.society.futures,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.rexx,comp.lang.perl,comp.lsi,alt.rv,alt.rmgroup,alt.pegan,alt.pantyhose,alt.overlords,alt.oobe,alt.magic,alt.music.alternative,alt.music,alt.games.mk,alt.games.sf2,alt.games.lynx,alt.food,alt.flame,alt.fan.q,alt.evil,alt.exotic.music,alt.config,alt.crackers,alt.coupons,alt.beer,alt.bbs,alt.bbs.ads,alt.bbs.doors,alt.3d,alt.1d
- Date: 16 Feb 1996 01:03:16 GMT
- Organization: Hewlett-Packard Fort Collins Site
- Distribution: inet
- Message-ID: <4g0l4k$b5k@fcnews.fc.hp.com>
- References: <4fr8nb$4l5@hg.oro.net>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: railyard.fc.hp.com
- X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
-
- Steven J. De (DEVALSJ@pop3.oro.net) wrote:
- : E-mail me to recieve these Qasic songs, you run them in qbasic by
- : pressing F5, and viola, they play stuff like alladin, each file
- : is a song i send via attachment. They are pretty neat, all 30 of
- : 'em!! So hit that e-mail button.
-
- : -Jonathan
-
- Please note that advertising is not allowed in this newsgroup
-
- alt.games.lynx
-
- I have quoted from an article in news.announce.newusers
- called "Advertising on Usenet. How to do it, how not to do it"
- which I recommend you read.
-
- Spamming
-
- Spamming is defined as posting identical or nearly-identical
- messages (not just ads, although ads are usually what spammers
- post) to a lot of newsgroups, one right after the other. Since
- it's really not that difficult to write a program that will
- post the same advertisement to dozens, if not hundreds or
- thousands of newsgroups, a lot of people have taken to doing
- this.
-
- What's happened to people who've spammed?
-
- They've lost their accounts, been mail-bombed (had thousands
- of pieces of junk email sent to them), had people call up and
- yell at them in the middle of the night, had people forward
- their mail (by this I mean paper mail, not email) to someplace
- strange, had people sign them up for thousands of unwanted
- magazine subscriptions, had people send them thousands of
- pages of condemnatory faxes, and so forth.
-
- *Nothing* is as hated on Usenet as spamming. It's extremely,
- unbelievably rude and if you do it, you *will* come to regret
- it.
-
- This is not a threat -- it's an observation. Any benefits
- spamming might have brought you will be more than counteracted
- by the intense public outcry against you in every newsgroup
- you posted your ad to.
-
- Some members of the media have gotten the mistaken impression
- that spamming is hated because it's *advertising*. While it's
- true that Usenet users don't have much fondness for advertising,
- the real reason spamming is hated so much is because it's
- unbelievably *rude*.
-
- If you don't regularly read a newsgroup, why would you post an
- ad to it? In so doing, you're basically saying that you don't
- care what the people in that newsgroup think or whether your ad
- might inconvenience them; you're out to benefit yourself. When
- you spam by posting the same advertisement to hundreds or
- thousands of newsgroups, you're saying that your personal profit
- is more important than the discussions of millions of people.
-
- Would *you* like it if someone came by your house day after day
- and shoveled several thousand copies of an advertising circular
- through your windows? Each copy of the ad takes up disk space
- on thousands of machines around the world -- and if you post the
- ad 1,000 times, that's millions of copies of your message that
- *you* are making other people pay to store copies of. When you
- spam, you're hogging hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
- other people's storage space.
-
- So please, don't do it. I've already explained that *one* copy
- of an off-topic ad is rude because it has nothing to do with the
- group it was posted to. Multiply that by a thousand times to get
- an idea of how rude it is to spam.
-
- A quick note about what happens to spam:
- ----------------------------------------
-
- Another consideration against spamming is that Usenet readers
- developed defenses against it, so it's not very effective. There
- are quite a few spam detectors running on Usenet, and if one of
- them detects that the same message has been posted repeatedly to
- multiple newsgroups, the humans who run those spam detectors will
- step in and actually *erase* the spamming messages with 'cancel'
- messages which are honored at most sites around the world.
-
- A common misconception shared by many members of the media is
- that spam is bad because it's *advertising* and that people who
- cancel spam are doing so to get rid of *advertising*. In actual
- point of fact, most Usenet users consider cancellation to be
- extremely bad manners and something to be done only as a last
- resort. When spam-cancellers cancel spam, it's done because
- of the *volume* (posting hundreds of times), not because of the
- content.
-
- The analogy that's often used is that yes, you have the right
- to walk down the street and say whatever you like -- but you
- do NOT have the right to stick your head in someone's house at
- 3 am and shout through a bullhorn.
-
- So if you *do* spam, you're likely to lose your account, have
- your personal life made a living hell, possibly get sued by
- people whose storage space you're taking up, and in the end,
- not very many people are even going to see your advertisement.
- It's just not worth the grief you'll get.
-
- Sorry to be unpleasant about it, but spam's a really bad idea.
-
- Finally, if you're wondering where the term "spamming" came
- from, it came from a Monty Python sketch in which the
- characters were in a restaurant which mainly sold Spam. Items
- on the menu included things like "Spam, Spam, Spam, eggs, ham,
- and Spam." Whenever the waitress recited the menu, a group of
- Vikings in the corner would chime in with her, chanting the
- word "Spam" over and over, drowning out everything else.
-
- Some members of the media have spread the explanation that
- the word "spamming" derives from throwing chunks of Spam into
- a fan. This is not where the term comes from.
-