For your newsgroups file:

dfw.general
General discussion that do not fit elsewhere in the dfw.* hierarchy

CHARTER

Intended Use of dfw.general

  1. Before posting to *any* newsgroup, you should read the articles in news.announce.newusers. These articles provide much insight into the niceties of newsgroups, including appropriate netiquette when posting.

  2. Discussions that relate to the D/FW Metropolitan area that don't fit into the other newsgroups in the dfw hierarchy are welcome here.

  3. There are a number of news groups (those in the dfw.jobs groups, dfw.forsale and dfw.personals) which are not discussion groups. Discussions relating to articles in those groups are welcome here.

  4. Discussions that are not specifically regional should be posted elsewhere(e.g. General state-wide issues should be posted to tx.general).

  5. dfw.general is NOT moderated, thus all free speech values are intact within this group. This also means that no one person is in control of who posts here, other than your local systems administrator (sysadmin/sysop). The sysops are responsible for deciding which newsgroups to carry locally and overseeing the newsgroups and files they choose to carry. There are guidelines for posting that are highly recommended and are listed below.

Articles unacceptable in dfw.general:

  1. SPAM, Chain letters, MAKE.MONEY.FAST, posts promoting personal or commercial web sites or services are not permitted.

  2. For Sale or Wanted ads of any sort.

  3. Commercial solicitation of any content.

  4. Binaries. This is not a binaries group. Do not post executables, sound files, image files, etc. in dfw.general.

  5. Any article over 30K, ~750 lines in length. Please provide links to such articles on a web or ftp site.

  6. Evangelizing, i.e., promoting any particular point of view of a religious topic. Religious refers not only to faith/non-faith in a higher being, but to any topic, e.g., the "best" text editor or programming language, subject to strong personal beliefs."

  7. Personal Ads

  8. Personal disputes.

  9. Quoting someone else's entire article just to add one or two lines. "Trim the quoted text in your followups."

  10. No political posts, or discussions of any nature. Please direct these to the appropriate political newsgroup. This includes no cross-posting to or from any political motivated newsgroup.

Canceling of Articles and Cross Posting:

  1. Crossposting should be used in dfw.general only when absolutely necessary, and before a reply is made to an ongoing discussion, the poster should check and eliminate any unnecessary groups that the thread is being cross-posted to and think twice before adding additional groups. the poster should also consider whether another group is more appropriate for the discussion as it stands now, and forward the discussion there though the use of Follow-To: headers. Even if a topic of discussion is about other areas, regional internet groups should not be added to the discussion on a "FYI" or "maximum coverage" basis.

  2. No more then three groups should receive any article placed in dfw.general, including dfw.general.

  3. Unacceptable examples of crossposting to dfw.general,
    1. Any flame group.
    2. Any group unrelated to the topics under discussion.
    3. Cross-posted to more then three (3) groups.
    4. Cross-posting to cause a flame war among the various groups you have posted to.

Article Format

  1. Articles posted to dfw.general MUST be flat-ASCII. This means:
    1. No Binary postings, uuencoded or base64.
    2. No MIME encoded messages. Posts SHOULD be readable by the simplest text-only newsreader.
    3. No HTML, although HTML-like emoticons are acceptable.
    4. No characters with a value greater than 127 in any part of the post.

  2. Posts SHOULD be shorter than 30K in size. Longer items SHOULD be made available for FTP or HTTP download and a pointer to that file posted.

  3. Posts MUST contain a valid From address, unless the ".invalid" domain is used (see RFC 1036). Spam blocks are acceptable. By definition USENET newsgroups are a broadcast medium. If you have a post that needs to be anonymous, it is not a valid topic for dfw.general. Post this material elsewhere.

  4. ROT13 encoding SHOULD NOT be used on any field in the headers. Nor should any attempts, except minimal spam blocks, be made to obscure the origins of the posting.

  5. Posts MUST contain a "Abuse-Reports-To:" or "X-Complaints-To:" header with a valid email address. When RFC1036 is updated, this line SHOULD be adjusted to comply with the latest specifications. Adding or replacing this header is the responsibility of the news server where the article was injected.

Failing to follow the above formatting requirements could result in an article being canceled instantly and without warning by an authorized moderation device (human or otherwise) for the group in question. Articles cross-posted to other groups and dfw.general must still follow the criteria of dfw.general and be subject to these rules.

$Id: dfw.general.html,v 1.4 2002/05/02 16:26:34 cirr Stable $

Copyright 1999; D. Vondrasek
Copyright 1999, DFW USENET cabal