Sdnet.* General Spam and Cancel Policy

1) Read the group for a week or two before posting to it. If there is FAQ's for a given sdnet newsgroup, read them and follow them. You can find the FAQ's for a given group in the sdnet newsgroup list

Articles subjected to cancellation:

• + Any spam that meets the BI Threshold.
  You may want to look at: Tim Skirvin's Spam FAQ Page for a more complete over view of BI Thresholds. This is the current spam policy for all of usenet.

• + Make Money Fast (MMF) articles. This also is the current policy for all of usenet.

• + Binary/image files in non-binary sdnet.* groups. This again is also with in the current spam policy for all of usenet. The reasons for this policy which is also considered a world wide policy can be found here.

• + MIME/HTML posts, and in particular any posting using a content- encoding other than 7bit, 8bit, or quoted-printable. Most users reading Usenet do not use a Web browser, and HTML is difficult or impossible to read to interpret the content. Some posters who post HTML also include a plain-text version of the message. This is redundant and wasteful. HTML also consumes much more bandwidth.

• + General Guide Lines Involving: Ongoing Flame Wars From Other Hierarchies:
  a) Any and all flames involving the long ongoing flame war in alt.astrology. There is is no exceptions nor is anyone omitted from this policy. This includes the initial article that caused the flame war and any follow ups to the flame war. There are no exceptions.
  b) Any and all articles cross posted to: alt.usenet.kooks, alt.astrology (as well as any other astrology newsgroup).
  c) Promoting your business. Sdnet.* hierarchy is not for promoting business.
  d) Sdnet.general is for discussions about and for San Diego and intended for San Diego users. It is not intended to carry out personal attacks on others, provoke flame wars or continue flame wars.
  e) The sdnet.* hierarchy is not intended to serve as a extension (carry over) for flame wars started in other hierarchies, no exceptions.

• + Cross posted articles outside of sdnet.* and excessive cross-posting. If you wish to follow-up to a article that is cross posted outside of a sdnet.* newsgroup, the proper usenet "Netiquette" is to only include the newsgroup that you are reading the article in.

• + Article should have something to do with San Diego in general. That means if you are posting a job offered article and the job is located outside San Diego such as New York this has no bearing to our local region. In addition trying to sell a car when you are located in Alaska has no bearing to our local groups. Please keep in mind these are *local* groups to San Diego.

• +Things a user can do when they see spam in the newsgroups. As users are encouraged to object to spam:

• +Do not follow up on spam. It usually is bad to follow up on spam, spammers do not read the groups they spam to and all it does is promote flame wars in general. However, if you do post a follow up to the spam please try and do the following:

  Edit out the main body of the spam as much as possible. There no good reason to include even more of the spam/ads, you are just promoting more of it. If the spam is posted to more then one group, remove all other newsgroups on the line except for the one you are reading it off of.

• +You are encouraged to mail the spammer and perhaps the postmaster of the abusing site (postmaster@whatever.domain) using a polite message. You can either mail a FAQ (that explains the character of the newsgroup they spammed) to the person who spammed the message and/or you can use a polite letter explaining the offense. A example letter would be some one posting a off-topic, out of area ad to sdnet.jobs.offered:

  "Your article was found in a _regional_ usenet newsgroup. This _regional_ newsgroup, 'sdnet' stands for San Diego, California, USA. It is meant for the people in San Diego for jobs IN San Diego. Your article was found not to even come close to the region of San Diego, Calif. Please locate the correct regional newsgroup for your article."

  You can see how this letter could easily be changed to fit any of the other sdnet newsgroups.

  The below comes from just one of many ISP's and their terms for service:

  "that the regional groups *only* permit postings related to their specific region, and that unless a group, by charter, *specifically* permits commercial postings, then such postings are not allowed."

• +In general, most of usenet is discussion not ads. Groups such as the jobs, forsale, etc are clearly ad based newsgroups with specific purposes. For the most part, the rest of sdnet is mostly for discussion purposes and ads are general not welcome (please check the newsgroups before advertizing in them).

• +Regional Hierarchies - They have a very specific purpose with a specific audience. In the case of sdnet.*, this regional hierarchy is open to the local people of San Diego, Calif., USA. Unlike the alt.* hierarchy and the big eight hierarchy, regional hierarchies set their own polices.

  In general, if a person(s) *continues* to knowingly, intentionally abuse this hierarchy (sdnet.*) by: harassment, stalking, flooding a newsgroup(s), impersonate or forge another users name for the purpose of harassment in the sdnet.* hierarchy or create a situation in the sdnet.* hierarchy such that the newsgroup(s) are no longer useable and the local regulars no longer feel comfortable in using the regional newsgroup(s) this will result in action taken against the abuser(s). Such actions could be and not limited to; being banned from the hierarchy (your articles will be cancelled when posted to the sdnet.* hierarchy), and reports sent to the ISP's involved.

  This above policies permit the sdnet.* Usenet News Administrators to cancel any article posted in the sdnet.* hierarchy that do not adhere to the above policies.

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