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Writing News

Of course, while there's a lot of interesting stuff out there, it's both fun and useful to add to the torrent yourself. Before you do so, remember that the network population is numbered in the millions.

Some guidelines:

• The net is a co-operative anarchy. Courtesy is all that keeps it usable. Courtesy comes in many forms, from being polite in wording your articles (usually a good idea) to being careful in deciding which group to post to and, indeed, whether to post at all.
• Be familiar with a group before posting to it. Read it for at least a week to get a feel for its intended subject matter and style.
• Compose your article in an editor. Run a spell checker over it. Proof read your article.
• Read the newsgroup news.answers. Much useful information is posted here.
• If your posting is a query, make some attempt to find the information locally before you resort to posting news.
• Don't cross-post! Posting one and the same news item to multiple news groups is frowned upon. Choose only one of the most appropriate groups to post to.

Ok, so you want to post news. There are two basic methods of posting:

1. Posting a followup. This means writing an article in response to another article, continuing a discussion. From within trn typing `F' will do this. There will be equivalent methods in the other newsreaders. Try to read the entire thread before posting a followup, it's likely that someone else had a similar thought and beat you to it.
2. Posting a new article, starting a new thread. This is done with the Pnews command:

   % Pnews

Remember to think carefully about which newsgroup should get the article.

Here are some more guidelines:

• Don't post requests such as `where can I find this program?' to those news groups devoted to discussions of source code (comp.sources.misc, etc). There are ancillary groups for requests like this (comp.sources.wanted, etc).
• Don't post to a world-wide group when a local (Australia wide) group will do. For example, try aus.ads.wanted rather than misc.wanted.
• If your request is more regional than the group, try to restrict its distribution with the Distribution: header (such as `Distribution: syd' for just Sydney).
• Again, if your request is more regional than the group, make this clear in the subject line. For example, a for sale notice should go in aus.ads.forsale, but people in Perth won't be that interested in an alarm clock for sale in Sydney. Mark the subject line like this:

  Subject: [Sydney] alarm clock for sale

  to save them the effort.

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