On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:13:23 GMT, Dan Conti wrote:

This seems to be the best info on the eBay rules for posting on Usenet
newsgroups:

"eBay users may not post on Usenet groups (Internet newsgroups) to
advertise eBay or an eBay listing that is inappropriate or
violates the Usenet board policy. If Usenet abuse is reported to
eBay, we may among other remedies remove the listing, issue a
warning, or suspend the user's eBay account.

Please note that eBay can only take action in cases where it's
clear it was an eBay member who posted to the Usenet group
inappropriately."

As you can see.. It is permitted by eBay to post a link to your
eBay auction listing IF and only IF it is appropriate for that
newsgroup. If the newsgroup permits it, then go for it if you
want... If it is against the policy of that newsgroup, then it can
be reported to eBay and your ISP who each may take actions.

Who determines what can be posted on WHAT newsgroup?

The answer to this kind of depends on the newsgroup hierarchy.

For an alt.* group (such as alt.radio.scanner), practically anyone
with sufficient knowledge of usenet to send out a control message to
newgroup the group can create a new alt.* group - the trick is
convincing news admin on various servers to carry the group on their
servers. The alt.* hierarchy is an ALTernative to the mainstream
(comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, soc.*, sci.*, etc.) hierarchy. It's
basically a refuge from the mainstream newsgroup guidelines.

The catch here is that sometimes alt.* groups are eventually moved to
the mainstream hierarchy. This is exactly what happened to
alt.radio.scanner which was moved to the rec.* hierarchy - and was
replaced by rec.radio.scanner. Now, the alt.radio.scanner group was
never removed from the alt.* hierarchy (primarily because news server
software is usually set up to ignore "remove group" messages - once an
alt.* group is successfully created and carried on mainstream Usenet
servers it pretty much exists forever)...but it was indeed replaced by
rec.radio.scanner, and you (and everyone else on Usenet) technically
are supposed to use rec.radio.scanner instead.

As for who determines what can be posted to rec.radio.scanner, that's
what the newsgroup's charter and FAQ is for. Which brings us to your
next question:

Where can these rules be found?

The charter and FAQs for most newsgroups in the mainstream hierarchy
can be found on the World Wide Web by searching for them using a
search engine. The one for rec.radio.scanner reads as follows:

"rec.radio.scanner is a newsgroup for discussion about "utility"
traffic above 30 MHz. FM & TV-broadcasting, shortwave, amateur radio
and broadcast satellite-related material doesn't belong to
rec.radio.scanner because they have their own newsgroups. This
newsgroup replaces alt.radio.scanner. In addition, the
rec.radio.scanner will be gatewayed to a mailing list which will be
created as soon as possible after newsgroup creation, as there are
many who do not have access to USENET news."

http://open-systems.ufl.edu/mirrors/....radio.scanner
has the complete archive of the entire process of rec.radio.scanner's
creation from the first proposal through the voting process. Including
the charter quoted above.

Who decides what is appropriate?

If the group is moderated, as many are, this decision is made by the
group's moderator(s). As an unmoderated newsgroup, rec.radio.scanner
(like any other unmoderated group) depends on users and news
administrators whose servers carry the group to voluntarily comply
with the written charter as well as written and unwritten rules
(netiquette). These are generally established over time, and is a big
reason why most Usenet FAQs advise newcomers to "lurk" for awhile and
observe how things are done in a group before they begin posting to
the group - in unmoderated groups, the question of what is and is not
appropriate for posting to a particular group is largely decided by
convention among the users who read and post to the group.

Judging from the responses you've gotten thus far in this and the two
other threads spawned on this subject, I'd say it would appear the
majority of users in alt.radio.scanner and rec.radio.scanner, at
least, who've expressed an opinion on the matter would seem to
consider your FA: postings inappropriate. Remember that in the
beginning, Usenet was largely confined to educational institutions,
governmental agencies, research companies and other commercial
enterprises with UNIX machines on site. It has now grown to include
millions of users at commercial sites such as AOL and at companies
around the world involved in every sort of business imaginable.
Nevertheless, many of the customs found on Usenet today have their
origins in the days when Usenet was very small and most Usenet sites
were universities. That these customs and traditions began when Usenet
was much smaller and quite different in nature in no way lessens the
anger many users feel when these customs and traditions are violated.
One such custom is the tradition and belief that it is rude to
advertise for profit in Usenet newsgroups. Advertising is widely seen
as an "off-topic" intrusion into the discussions of any particular
newsgroup.

Due to the decentralized nature of Usenet, there is no one person or
body which can "enforce" the custom of staying on-topic. It falls on
each user to help preserve the culture of open discussion and free
speech that Usenet has come to embody by not posting off-topic
material. This, of course, includes advertising. Advertising is by far
the most pervasive form of off-topic posting, and therefore, gets most
of the heat.

My rantings aside, this entire episode will be a good learning
experience for us all.

Apparently, if I go to eBay with a FA posting and tell them it's against
the newsgroup rules, that person is in violation and subject to all
kinds of actions...

This applies not only to E-Bay, but also to Internet Service
Providers. In my opinion, a responsible response to a complaint would
be to examine the material that was posted and is the subject of
complaint, compare to the group's charter and FAQ (if available) to
see if the complaint is well-founded or not, and go from there.
Unfortunately, most network administrators simply don't have time to
do all that, especially with a large outfit like AOL or E-Bay or
Google, etc. - and in cases where the matter of whether a post is
appropriate or not depends more on user convention in the group, it
may be almost impossible for a net admin to determine unless he/she
happens to read the group regularly - so either they ignore complaints
until they get served with legal papers, OR they take action on
complaints that are not well-founded, allowing an innocent victim to
maybe get his/her account yanked based on a complaint someone else
filed purely as a form of harassment. Which of these is the worst
extreme depends, I suppose, on one's point of view. Suffice to say,
though, that anyone who continues to post material that he *knows* is
considered inappropriate by most of the users in a newsgroup, should
not be angry at anyone but himself if the consequences turn out to be
rather unpleasant.

Again, all of this applies mainly to the two scanner newsgroups. The
rec.radio.swap newsgroup was *created* for the purpose of advertising
radio equipment for sale, auction, or trade.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/radio/swap-guide/

....has the FAQ for this newsgroup, which happens to contain the
following paragraph:

"It has become common practice to append "FS" ("For Sale"), "WTB"
("Want To Buy"), or "WTT" ("Want To Trade") to the subject line of an
ad. With the new online auction service, eBay, we ask that you include
"FA" ("For Auction") and also "eBay" to your subject line if you
choose to place an auction notice. (Note that a recent straw poll
revealed that many readers are not happy seeing auction notices on
r.r.swap - post such notices at your own risk! If you fail to append
"FA" and "eBay" in your subject line, you will surely be flamed.)"

Nose around on the faqs.org site and you can find FAQs for other
newsgroups as well. One of the things you'll notice is that most
groups are intended for discussion, not for advertising -
rec.radio.swap being the notable exception in this family of groups.
In other words, those who insist on posting advertisements to these
groups do so at their own risk. It matters little that a hundred other
people may be doing it too - that does not reduce (and in fact
probably increases) the anger felt by users when they see such
advertising where it rightfully does not belong.

For what it's worth, Dan, as I see it you have two separate issues
here, one with E-Bay and one with the users in these newsgroups. So
far as E-Bay is concerned, I do not do business with E-Bay either as a
seller or as a buyer. I do not buy items sight unseen, period. So,
I've no axe to grind with respect to E-Bay - though it occurs to me
that your relationship with E-Bay is a voluntary one, and you're of
course always free to stop doing business with E-Bay.

But insofar as the folks on the newsgroups are concerned?

Yes, you're right, more than half the stuff that comes through some of
these newsgroups is off topic BS. You think it's bad in the scanner
groups? Check out rec.radio.shortwave where half the morons in the
group seem to think it's some kind of political discussion group where
it's open season on whoever happens to be the current POTUS!

But Dan, that doesn't make it okay for you or anyone else to add to
it. Two wrongs don't make a right; two thousand wrongs don't make a
right. If you think back to how angry you felt when your auction was
cancelled by E-Bay...you have some idea of how many people feel every
time they download their usenet mail and find it full of stuff that
shouldn't be there. Personally, I use a real newsreader that can,
indeed, filter out things based on keywords in the subject, by sender,
and by several other criteria as well - as you suggested upthread. The
thing is, the newsreader still has to download the headers and then
apply the filters to get rid of it - which means I not only have to
waste *my* time to create the filters, I also have to waste more of
*my* time and *my* bandwidth downloading the headers from all this
off-topic and unwanted stuff that shouldn't be there before my
newsreader can get rid of it all.

Since I pay for my access to the Internet, this means that in effect,
everyone who refuses to voluntarily abide by Netiquette force me (and
who knows how many others who read these groups as well) to pay for
the time and bandwidth expended to download stuff that I shouldn't
have to deal with in the first place. Again, it matters not whether
there's one person doing it or a thousand, all who do are equally
guilty, and this is truly a case where if you're not part of the
solution by voluntarily adhering to netiquette, then you're part of
the problem.

John Kasupski, Tonawanda, New York
Amateur Radio (KC2HMZ), SWL/Scanner Monitoring (KNY2VS)
zIRC #monitor Admin