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1986-02-23
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FidoNews FidoNews
Article Submission Guidelines Article Submission Guidelines
Last Updated
21 February 1986
FidoNews is the user group newsletter of the users of the FidoNet(tm)
remote bulletin board network. As of this writing it has an estimated
readership of seventy thousand people nationwide. In keeping with the
nature of FidoNet(tm), FidoNews is an electronic newsletter which is
passed from node to node over the network. All of the articles which
appear in FidoNews are written by users of FidoNet(tm). FidoNews is
very much an electronic newsletter by, of, and for Fido users and
sysops. This document describes the technical aspects of submitting
an article to FidoNews.
FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 1
_________________________ INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
FidoNews is assembled as a scheduled event at FidoNet(tm) node 1/1.
Every Monday morning a special utility called MAKENEWS is run, which
puts together the various articles which have been received and
generates the latest issue. The ROBOT utility is then run to place
release messages into the network mail area, so that the finished
newsletter will be automatically mailed out during the Monday morning
national mail slot.
The intended purpose of this procedure is to ensure that FidoNews is
assembled and released on time, even if node 1/1 is unattended on
Sunday night.
In practice, the primary purpose of the MAKENEWS utility is to scan
the articles which have been submitted for any technical disqualifica-
tions. If MAKENEWS finds an article which does not meet its technical
specs, then a message is logged and that article is not included in
the newsletter. At this point the article must be modified by hand
until it passes the technical requirements. Since this is dependant
on the availability of human resources, then an article which fails to
meet the specs may be delayed indefinitely, or even cancelled
entirely.
Much of this document is intended to describe the technical specifica-
tions which an article must meet in order to be included in the news-
letter.
FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 2
_____________________ SUBMITTING AN ARTICLE
The first step, of course, is to create a file which contains the text
of your article. You should then send the file via FidoNet(tm) mail to
node 1/1.
Filename extensions are used to distinguish types of submissions, as
follows:
.ART An article, commentary, open letter, or general news
item.
.SAL A "For Sale" advertisement.
.WAN A "Wanted" advertisement.
.COL A column, or other regular feature.
.NOT A notice for the back of the issue.
If your file doesn't have one of the above extensions, then it will
lay around taking up disk space until some human takes a look at it
and realizes what it is.
The name of the file is up to you, though you should use a name which
is not likely to be "stepped on" by someone else. For example,
FNEWS.ART is probably not a good name for an article.
If you are writing a regular feature, such as a column or a series of
articles, you can put a number at the end of the name, and submit
several in a batch. For example, you could send in a set of five
files, named:
MYWORD1.COL
MYWORD2.COL
MYWORD3.COL
MYWORD4.COL
MYWORD5.COL
These would be used one at a time in sequence. MYWORD1.COL would be
printed the first week, MYWORD2.COL the second, and so on.
FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 3
________________________ TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
This section describes the technical requirements which an article
must pass before the MAKENEWS utility will include it in FidoNews. If
your file does not meet these criteria, then, again, it will languish
on the disk until some human steps in and fixes it.
These constraints are for purely practical reasons. There are roughly
a million different word processors out there, all with their own
different formats. We simply do not have the time to convert them all
to the format we use.
1. FLUSH LEFT MARGIN: The finished FidoNews is indented five columns.
We do that here. If your submission is also indented, then your
indent will be added to ours. So please set your left margin all
the way at the edge of the screen.
2. RIGHT MARGIN AT COLUMN 65 OR LESS: Less is tolerable, more is
definitely not.
3. NO FUNNY CHARACTERS: This includes formfeeds, returns without
linefeeds, linefeeds without returns, and other oddities.
4. NO GRAPHICS CHARACTERS: Believe it or not, not everyone in the
world has an IBM PC. Please restrict yourself to printable ASCII
characters in the range 20 hex to 7E hex (space to tilde).
However, if you are using PC-Write to create your file, then feel
free to use the "hard space", "hard hyphen", and "soft hyphen"
characters. MAKENEWS understands them, and will handle them
properly.
5. TOTAL ARTICLE LENGTH: Well, there IS an upper limit, but I'm not
going to say what it is, because:
a) it's pretty big,
b) it changes from time to time, and
c) we override it now and then, as the circumstances merit.
Advertisements and notices are an exception. Since we don't charge
for ads, we feel justified in limiting them. The maximum length of
an advertisement is rather small (never more than one page).
6. WHERE IS THIS ARTICLE FROM: A good question! You can submit an
article anonymously if you want to, but most folks start out by
stating their name and node number.
If you want your article to be listed in the table of contents, then
you should start it with a "content line". This is just a normal
line, except that it is the FIRST line of your file, and it begins
with an asterisk ("*"). Here's an example of a content line:
* My Word!
FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 4
_______ EXAMPLE
Here's a sample of what a typical submission might look like:
* A Sample Article
Thom Henderson
Fido 1/1
This Is My Title
And here is my article. Note that it is flush left (zero
indent). Also note that the right margin is at column sixty
five, so that the result will look good when the formatter sets
it up. I also started the file with a content line, so my
article will be listed in the table of contents.
Figure 1. Table 1.
+-------+ ========
| A Box | Alfa
+-------+ Bravo
Note that I am not using any funny characters. This ensures that
the final article will look the same to every user, no matter
what sort of hardware he has.
This is the last sentence of my article.
And that's all there is to it! You should be able to get a file like
this out of any word processor.
FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 5
_________________ FORMATTING ADVICE
There are certain things you should do to improve the general
appearance of your article when it is published. After all, seventy
thousand of your fellow users will be looking at it. You want it to
look good, don't you?
You may have noticed that FidoNews articles are separated by dashed
lines. These are inserted by MAKENEWS, so you shouldn't add them
yourself. If you put a dashed line at the top and/or bottom of your
article, then it will appear right next to the dashed line MAKENEWS
inserts. Since your line is almost certain to be a different length,
then the result will not look very good.
You should also put a blank line between paragraphs. This sets them
off better than just indenting the first line, and makes you article
easier to read.
You should not, however, put a lot of blank space at the top or bottom
of your article. MAKENEWS works hard to make sure that the articles
are well separated to the eye, so any space you add at the ends will
just waste paper when someone prints out the news.
If you want to put in a table or a figure, go right ahead. MAKENEWS
does not rearrange text, so your table or figure will remain exactly
as you entered it.
If you want to justify the right margin, please feel free. You may
also leave it ragged if you wish. An even right margin looks neater,
while a ragged margin makes for text that is easier to read. A friend
of mine once told me that an even right margin is really just a
gimmick, since typesetters don't really do it that way, but you decide
for yourself.
____________ OTHER ADVICE
The biggest thing I see, the thing that irks me most, is when someone
submits an article that is full of basic errors in spelling, grammar,
and/or punctuation. Please remember, seventy thousand people will be
reading what you write. Please, for your own sake, use a dictionary
when you're not sure how a word is spelled. Or, if you're not good at
grammar, get a friend to help you write your article. We ain't the
Literary Digest here, and our standards are pretty (very) lax. If
you're willing to write it, we'll put it in. It's just that it's in
your own best interest to come off looking good.
_________________ EDITORIAL CONTENT
I suppose I should say something about article content. Basically,
it's up to you. As we've stated many times, FidoNews isn't ours, it's
yours. We will publish ANYTHING. Most articles tend to be related in
some way to personal computing, but that is by no means a requirement
on our part.
FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 6
_____________________________ WHEN WILL YOUR ARTICLE APPEAR
A good question indeed, and almost impossible to answer.
If FidoNews is running unattended (as it sometimes does in the
summer), then all received articles that meet the above criteria will
probably be published in the third issue after they are received.
The reason for the delay is to allow us some time to "play" with each
issue before it goes out. You see, while things are set up to get the
news out even when node 1/1 is unattended, we still usually go over
everything by hand. Fitting together a newsletter is in some respects
like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Some parts have to go right away,
while others can wait a bit. Some articles are longer than others.
And articles seem to arrive here in "spurts". We might get two
articles one week, and then twenty the next. We generally try to keep
the issues more-or-less the same size, so you don't get a fifty page
newsletter one week, and a two page newsletter the next.
So sometimes we'll push an article up, and publish it right away.
More often we'll hold it back for a short while. As a general rule,
we usually have some idea of how the next three newsletters are
shaping up, so we usually juggle things around a bit to try and even
things out.
_________ YOUR TURN
I've typed enough for one night. Now it's YOUR turn to sit down and
write that article you're thinking about! Best wishes, and good luck!
FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 7