Some Timely Advice for ALL Usenet Users.

Disclaimer: While I have never been flamed in my three years of Usenet access that does not make me an official source of Usenet advice.

• Read the FAQ! Every group has their own and it probably covers 99% of the questions that you're thinking of asking. This will save you and the rest of the Usenet community a lot of time and not to mention dollars. A colletion of FAQs from most newsgroups are kept rtfm.mit.edu (short for Read The F*** Manual) and FAQs are posted on regularly on thier respective newsgroups.

• Read the following newsgoups in order to become acclimated to the Usenet environment: news.newusers.questions.............Q & A for users new to the USENET news.answers...........................Repository for periodic USENET posts. news.announce.newusers.............Explanatory postings for new users.

• If you want to do a test post, post only to newsgroups designed for that purpose like misc.test, alt.test, or a local testing bed. This way you save us the trouble of seeing "testing, please ignore" messages.

• Lurk before you leap. This may be the most important of all. Hang around the newsgroup to get a feel for that specific newsgroup and its community. All newsgroup communites are different and what may have been kosher in alt.sex won't be in alt.feminism. To use a popular analogy, it's like going to a foreign country. You wouldn't just go there and start talking without first getting to know the customs, so don't jump on a newsgroup and make an ASS of your self on the first day.

I did not write any of the following Netiquette guides. All legal rights are maintained by the original authors and I have tried to give due credit. Note that most of these are not Usenet specific but have good sections on Usenet etiquette.

MacUser's Net Traveler: Niceties on the Net

Partick Crispen's ROADMAP: Netiquette

Arlene Rinaldi's Netiquette Home Page