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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 |
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