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- Subject: Introduction to news.announce
- Newsgroups: news.announce.newusers,news.answers
- From: netannounce@deshaw.com (Mark Moraes)
- Date: Sat, 12 Nov 1994 09:00:35 GMT
-
- Archive-name: news-announce-intro/part1
- Original-author: mark@stargate.com (Mark Horton)
- Comment: enhanced & edited until 5/93 by spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
- Last-change: 27 Oct 1994 by netannounce@deshaw.com (Mark Moraes)
- Changes-posted-to: news.misc,news.answers
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: Introduction.
-
- Welcome to Usenet! This periodic posting describes the the major Usenet
- announcement newsgroups. There are the four moderated newsgroups in the
- news.announce.hierarchy -- news.announce.important,
- news.announce.newgroups, news.announce.newusers and
- news.announce.conferences. The moderated groups news.admin.technical,
- news.answers and news.lists are also described, since they are closely
- related to the announcement newsgroups.
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: news.announce.important
-
- "news.announce.important" is a newsgroup for just what it says it is --
- important announcements. It is intended to be read by everyone on
- Usenet, although nobody is forced to subscribe. To post to
- news.announce.important, send mail to the moderator at
- "announce@stargate.com". Some netnews implementations will
- automatically mail to the moderator anything posted instead of
- attempting to post it directly. If the message is appropriate, it will
- be posted by the moderator; if not, the moderator will suggest a more
- appropriate place to post it or a better way to go about the same
- goal.
-
- Discussions in news.announce.important are explicitly forbidden, and
- the volume of traffic will be kept low enough to keep people from
- feeling a need to unsubscribe. Usenet administrators for each site
- should make a point of reading news.announce.important.
-
- The current policy is that news.announce.important submissions must be:
-
- (a) short - preferably they should fit on one crt screen, including headers.
- (b) important enough to at least have their header shown to everyone on the
- net. The posting should be more of benefit to the net than to the poster.
- (c) not posted to any other newsgroup - news.announce.important by itself is
- supposed to be sufficient to reach everybody, and nobody should have to
- read an announcement more than once.
- (d) signed - the author should be clearly evident.
- (e) not commercial, political, or religious in nature.
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: news.announce.newsgroups
-
- "news.announce.newgroups" exists for announcements of either the
- creation or the consideration of a new newsgroup. All calls for
- votes, calls for discussions, vote results, and creation notices of
- all hierarchies should be posted to news.announce.newgroups.
- Submissions should be directed to announce-newgroups@uunet.uu.net (or to
- your nearest major site). Followups will be redirected to
- news.groups.
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: news.announce.newusers
-
- Introductory messages like this one will be repeated every month, in
- order to reach all newcomers. These messages will be placed in
- news.announce.newusers, which is also moderated. This makes it safe for
- experienced users who have already read these messages to unsubscribe to
- news.announce.newusers without missing anything new in
- news.announce.important.
-
- If you aren't familiar with the netnews guidelines in
- news.announce.newusers, please read them carefully. Your understanding
- of these rules will assure that you don't annoy the more than 3 million
- members of the net community (estimated) by unintentionally abusing the
- net, and will help you get more value from the net.
-
- This group does not accept postings from users (although the moderator is
- usually willing to entertain suggestions for edits and additions to
- existing postings). In addition to the periodic re-posting of these
- messages in news.announce.newusers, changes to the news.announce.newusers
- postings will be posted to news.misc; this allows experienced users to
- just follow the differences. After reading the postings in
- news.announce.newusers, newcomers can refer to the lists of newsgroups,
- mailing lists and periodic informational postings in news.lists.
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: news.answers
-
- Many newsgroups have postings that are made periodically for new users
- of those specific groups. These postings are usually referred to as
- FAQs, or Frequently-Asked Questions. The postings are usually
- cross-posted to the news.answers (and companion comp.answers,
- sci.answers, etc.) newsgroup for purposes of archiving and
- consolidated searching. Normally, users will not post articles here
- unless they have constructed a FAQ for a particular newsgroup.
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: news.announce.conferences
-
- news.announce.conferences is for announcements of conference programs,
- calls for papers, and things of that kind. Submissions should be
- directed to nac@sparky.sterling.com. Please keep Subject lines
- informative; if space permits, mention the topic and location there,
- and avoid acronyms unless very widely known.
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: news.admin.technical
-
- news.admin.technical is a newsgroup for discussion about Usenet software,
- policies, and the technical aspects of running Usenet news. Postings of
- a more general nature should be posted to the unmoderated group
- news.admin.misc instead.
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: news.lists
-
- Several people make an on-going effort to collect administrative
- information and interesting statistics about Usenet. This information,
- usually in the form of lists, is posted on a regular basis to the
- news.lists newsgroup. This allows others interested in these topics
- (such as news flow, volume, valid newsgroup names, etc) to find them all
- in one particular place. Again, this is not a group in which users will
- normally post, but they may find the information in the group to be of
- interest. Here are some postings in that group that users may want to
- consult.
-
- List of Active Newsgroups, Part ...
-
- Names and descriptions of all newsgroups in Usenet.
-
- Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part ...
-
- Describes the alternative newsgroup hierarchies, including alt.*,
- bionet.*, bit.*, biz.*, clari.*, gnu.*, hepnet.*, ieee.*, the
- inet/ddn distribution, info.*, k12.*, relcom.*, u3b.* and
- vmsnet.*. While alternative groups use the same underlying
- technology for transmission and reading, they are not considered
- part of mainstream Usenet, by definition.
-
- List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part ...
-
- A comprehensive list of postings like this one, including the
- information-rich Frequently Asked Questions postings (FAQs).
-
- Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part ...
-
- A list of the large number of electronic mailing-lists that
- complement or sometimes supplement Usenet. Mailing lists usually
- have smaller audiences or more specialized interests than the
- average newsgroup; some of them later become Usenet groups. Many
- of these mailing lists are also available as gatewayed Usenet
- groups in the info.* and bit.listserv.* alternative hierarchies.
-
- Mailing Lists Available in Usenet
-
- A list of those Usenet newsgroups that are also available as
- mailing lists.
-
- Usenet Moderated Newsgroup Archive List
-
- Lists the location, maintainer and other general information
- about the archives of moderated Usenet newsgroups. This is not an
- all encompassing list of archives for each group. Only the
- archives that the moderators consider official or one recommended
- archive for the newsgroup is listed.
-
- ------------------------------
-
- Subject: Moderators.
-
- Mark Horton Mark Moraes
- news.announce.important moderator news.announce.newusers moderator
- mark@stargate.com netannounce@deshaw.com
-
- David Lawrence Rich Ohnemus
- news.announce.newgroups moderator news.announce.conferences moderator
- news.lists moderator nac-request@sparky.sterling.com
- tale@uunet.uu.net
-
- Jonathan Kamens Scott Hazen Mueller
- news.answers moderator news.admin.technical moderator
- news-answers-request@mit.edu natech-request@uunet.uu.net
-
- ------------------------------
-
-