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In rn, you have to wait until you get to the end of a newsgroup
to hit F, which will bring up a message-composing system.
Alternately, at your host system’s command line, you can type
Pnews
and hit enter. You’ll be prompted somewhat similarly to the nn
system, except that you’ll be given a list of possible distributions.
If you chose “world,” you’ll get this message:
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire
civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of
dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]
Don’t worry — your message won’t really cost the Net untold
amounts, although, again, it’s a good idea to think for a second
whether your message really should go everywhere.
If you want to respond to a given post through e-mail, instead of
publicly, hit R in nn or r or R in rn. In rn, as with follow-up
articles, the upper-case key includes the original message in yours.
Most newsgroups are unmoderated, which means that every message
you post will eventually wind up on every host system within the
geographic region you specified that carries that newsgroup.
Some newsgroups, however, are moderated, as you saw earlier with
comp.risks. In these groups, messages are shipped to a single
location where a moderator, acting much like a magazine editor,
decides what actually gets posted. In some cases, groups are
moderated like scholarly journals. In other cases, it’s to try to cut
down on the massive number of messages that might otherwise be posted.
You’ll notice that many articles in Usenet end with a fancy
“signature” that often contains some witty saying, a clever drawing
and, almost incidentally, the poster’s name and e-mail address. You
too can have your own “signature” automatically appended to everything
you post. On your own computer, create a signature file. Try to keep
it to four lines or less, lest you annoy others on the Net. Then,
while connected to your host system, type
cat>.signature
and hit enter (note the period before the s). Upload your signature
file into this using your communications software’s ASCII upload
protocol. When done, hit control-D, the Unix command for closing a
file. Now, every time you post a message, this will be appended to it.
There are a few caveats to posting. Usenet is no different from
a Town Meeting or publication: you’re not supposed to break the law,
whether that’s posting copyrighted material or engaging in illegal
activities. It is also not a place to try to sell products (except in
certain biz. and for-sale newsgroups).
3.8 CROSS-POSTING
Sometimes, you’ll have an issue you think should be discussed in
more than one Usenet newsgroup. Rather than posting individual messages
in each group, you can post the same message in several groups at once,
through a process known as cross-posting.
Say you want to start a discussion about the political
ramifications of importing rare tropical fish from Brazil. People who
read rec.aquaria might have something to say. So might people who read
alt.politics.animals and talk.politics.misc.
Cross-posting is easy. It also should mean that people on other
systems who subscribe to several newsgroups will see your message only
once, rather than several times — news-reading software can cancel out
the other copies once a person has read the message. When you get ready
to post a message (whether through Pnews for rn or the :post command in
nn), you’ll be asked in which newsgroups. Type the names of the various
groups, separated by a comma, but no space, for example:
rec.aquaria,alt.politics.animals,talk.politics.misc
and hit enter. After answering the other questions (geographic
distribution, etc.), the message will be posted in the various
groups (unless one of the groups is moderated, in which case the
message goes to the moderator, who decides whether to make it public).
It’s considered bad form to post to an excessive number of
newsgroups, or inappropriate newsgroups. Probably, you don’t really have
to post something in 20 different places. And while you may think your
particular political issue is vitally important to the fate of the world,
chances are the readers of rec.arts.comics will not, or at least not
important enough to impose on them. You’ll get a lot of nasty e-mail
messages demanding you restrict your messages to the “appropriate”
newsgroups.
Chapter 4: USENET II
4.1 FLAME, BLATHER AND SPEW
Something about online communications seems to make some people
particularly irritable. Perhaps it’s the immediacy and semi-anonymity
of it all. Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will
soon think seem to exist to make you miserable.
Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do
with a letter received on paper, it’s just so easy to hit your R key
and tell somebody you don’t really know what you really think of them.
Even otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into
raving lunatics. When this happens, flames erupt.
A flame is a particularly nasty, personal attack on somebody for
something he or she has written. Periodically, an exchange of flames
erupts into a flame war that begin to take up all the space in a given
newsgroup (and sometimes several; flamers like cross-posting to let the
world know how they feel). These can go on for weeks (sometimes they go
on for years, in which case they become “holy wars,” usually on such
topics as the relative merits of Macintoshes and IBMs). Often, just when
they’re dying down, somebody new to the flame war reads all the messages,
gets upset and issues an urgent plea that the flame war be taken to e-
mail so everybody else can get back to whatever the newsgroup’s business
is. All this usually does, though, is start a brand new flame war, in
which this poor person comes under attack for daring to question the
First Amendment, prompting others to jump on the attackers for impugning
this poor soul… You get the idea.
Every so often, a discussion gets so out of hand that somebody
predicts that either the government will catch on and shut the whole
thing down or somebody will sue to close down the network, or maybe
even the wrath of God will smote everybody involved. This brings what
has become an inevitable rejoinder from others who realize that the
network is, in fact, a resilient creature that will not die easily:
“Imminent death of Usenet predicted. Film at 11.’’
Flame wars can be tremendously fun to watch at first. They
quickly grow boring, though. And wait until the first time you’re
attacked!
Flamers are not the only net.characters to watch out for.
Spewers assume that whatever they are particularly concerned about
either really is of universal interest or should be rammed down the
throats of people who don’t seem to care — as frequently as possible.
You can usually tell a spewer’s work by the number of articles he posts
in a day on the same subject and the number of newsgroups to which he
then sends these articles — both can reach well into double digits.
Often, these messages relate to various ethnic conflicts around the
world. Frequently, there is no conceivable connection between the issue
at hand and most of the newsgroups to which he posts. No matter. If you
try to point this out in a response to one of these messages, you will be
inundated with angry messages that either accuse you of being an
insensitive racist/American/whatever or ignore your point entirely to
bring up several hundred more lines of commentary on the perfidy of
whoever it is the spewer thinks is out to destroy his people.
Closely related to these folks are the Holocaust revisionists, who
periodically inundate certain groups (such as soc.history) with long
rants about how the Holocaust never really happened. Some people
attempt to refute these people with facts, but others realize this only
encourages them.
Blatherers tend to be more benign. Their problem is that they
just can’t get to the point — they can wring three or four screenfuls
out of a thought that others might sum up in a sentence or two. A
related condition is excessive quoting. People afflicted with this will
include an entire message in their reply rather than excising the
portions not relevant to whatever point they’re trying to make. The
worst quote a long message and then add a single line:
“I agree!”
or some such, often followed by a monster .signature (see section 4.5)
There are a number of other Usenet denizens you’ll soon come to
recognize. Among them:
Net.weenies. These are the kind of people who enjoy Insulting
others, the kind of people who post nasty messages in a sewing
newsgroup just for the hell of it.
Net.geeks. People to whom the Net is Life, who worry about what
happens when they graduate and they lose their free, 24-hour access.
Net.gods. The old-timers; the true titans of the Net and the
keepers of its collective history. They were around when the Net
consisted of a couple of computers tied together with baling wire.
Lurkers. Actually, you can’t tell these people are there, but
they are. They’re the folks who read a newsgroup but never post or
respond.
Wizards. People who know a particular Net-related topic inside
and out. Unix wizards can perform amazing tricks with that operating
system, for example.
Net.saints. Always willing to help a newcomer, eager to share
their knowledge with those not born with an innate ability to navigate
the Net, they are not as rare as you might think. Post a question
about something and you’ll often be surprised how many responses you
get.
The last group brings us back to the Net’s oral tradition. With
few written guides, people have traditionally learned their way around
the Net by asking somebody, whether at the terminal next to them or on
the Net itself. That tradition continues: if you have a question, ask.
Today, one of the places you can look for help is in the
news.newusers.questions newsgroup, which, as its name suggests, is a
place to learn more about Usenet. But be careful what you post. Some
of the Usenet wizards there get cranky sometimes when they have to
answer the same question over and over again. Oh, they’ll eventually
answer your question, but not before they tell you should have
asked your host
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