austin.* Usenet Abuse
what it is and what we're doing about it
Introduction
Resources on Usenet Use and Abuse
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Introduction
Usenet is a cooperative venture, and things go pretty smoothly when everybody cooperates. That cooperation is important, because Usenet is a "recipient pays" system. When you post a message, each recipient pays a cut of the transmission and storage costs for that message. Sure, it's only a minute fraction of a penny, but when you total up all of the people and all of the postings, Usenet gets to be a pretty expensive proposition.
Certain types of postings are so bad and so abusive that most people never want to see them - let alone pay for them. There is general agreement throughout the Austin area that the following sorts of postings are unacceptable:
- Excessively re-posted messages (so called "spam").
- Postal lottery (so called "Make Money Fast") chain letters.
- Large binary encoded messages in discussion groups.
- Violations of formal newsgroup charters.
When these things occur in an austin.* newsgroup, I issue an advisory net-abuse cancelation against them. This is a control message that circulates to all Austin-area news servers asking them to delete the offending posting. If the news server elects to honor these advisories, it does so.
This following information is available:
- Cancels Archive
- A searchable archive of all the advisory net-abuse cancels, plus copies of the original postings. Use this to see recent cancel activity -- or to check if your friends and neighbors have been spamming the net!
- Usenet Death Penalty
- When all else fails, the final recourse is to institute a Usenet Death Penalty. This page explains what that means, and shows what UDP actions are currently active in the austin.* newsgroups.
- Complaint Form Letters
- Copies of the form letters that are sent out when a cancel has been issued.
- Resources on Usenet Use and Abuse
- Information published elsewhere on how to use the net properly, and why some of these abuses are so bad that they merit canceling.
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