From GOLDEN@huhept.harvard.edu Thu Jul 28 17:45:38 1994
Received: from HUHEPW.HARVARD.EDU (huhepw.harvard.edu [128.103.100.158]) by eff.org (8.6.9/8.6.6) with SMTP id RAA25918; Thu, 28 Jul 1994 17:45:35 -0400
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 1994 17:46:11 -0400 (EDT)
From: GOLDEN@huhept.harvard.edu
To: greeny@eff.org, kadie@eff.org
CC: GOLDEN@huhept.harvard.edu
Message-Id: <940728174611.20e007dd@HUHEPL.HARVARD.EDU>
Subject: Site Admin's Guide to Netiquette
Status: RO

Below I attaching a copy of a document I've been writing, "The Usenet Site
Administrator's Guide to Netiquette".  I'm sending it to you because I mention
the CAF archives.  I'm hoping that when it's done it will be posted to
news.answers, etc.

I wrote it because I was concerned about the press coverage of the Canter and
Siegel affair, especially the New York Times's reports that killing C&S's posts
amounted to censorship.  I think that the existence of this document will be
useful to smooth the inclusion of new sites into Usenet.  While I think that
the vast majority of site admins do an excellent job, the existence of a
written set of rules (even if they are just one man's opinion) will help
explain to the new site admins what some of the issues are.  The codification
in a document of the Netiquette rules will help explain to the press what the
site admins are doing.

I hope you have time to give it a look.

	- Mitchell Golden
	  (golden@physics.harvard.edu)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

	     The Usenet Site Administrator's Guide to Netiquette
			 (version 0.3, July 28, 1994)


Table of Contents

1)  I want to join Usenet!
2)  What is Usenet, and how do I get it?
3)  Why should I get Usenet?
4)  What about companies on Usenet?
5)  My company wants to post to Usenet because we think it is a cheap way to
    advertise.
6)  Which newsgroups should I carry?
7)  How long should the articles' expiration times be?
8)  What is "net-abuse"?
9)  What should I do about net-abuse?
10) What codes of conduct should I impose on the users of my site?
11) What are the legal issues?
12) What other things can I do with my Usenet site?
13) What are my ongoing responsibilies?
14) Okay, the software is set up, what do I do now?
15) Who wrote this document, anyway?

1) I want to join Usenet!

This is the Site Administrator's Guide to Netiquette.  It represents the
opinions of the author about how to deal with various problems you may run
across running a Usenet site.  It is _not_ a technical document about the
software.  Nor is it legal advice (heaven forbid)!

2) What is Usenet, and how do I get it?

You're reading the wrong document.  Go read "What is Usenet".  You probably
also want to read "How to become a USENET site".  In order to understand the
discussions here you should be familiar with "A Primer on How to Work With the
Usenet Community" and/or "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on
Netiquette", and/or "Rules for posting to Usenet".  Especially if you're
installing a commercial site, you should see "A Guide to Buying and Selling on
Usenet".  All of these documents should be found in the newsgroups
news.answers and news.announce.newusers.

3) Why should I get Usenet?

Well, that depends who you are.  If you are at a university, your site will
allow your university community to participate in discussions with people from
around the world on a huge variety of topics.  The information contained in
Usenet posts may not be the most valuable stuff available electronically, but
it is certainly among the most freewheeling.

4) What about companies on Usenet?

No problem.  Most Usenet sites nowadays are commercial.  However, you should
consider who in your company you really want reading newsgroups on company
time, and which groups.

5) My company wants to post to Usenet because we think it is a cheap way to
   advertise.

Careful here!  Usenet is _not_ intended as a broadcast medium.  It is for
people to carry on discussions about specific topics in which they are already
interested.  Before you set up your site it is important that you and your
site's users understand this distinction.

You may have heard that there is a culture of hostility of Usenet readers to
advertisements.  If you understand what Usenet is, it's easy to understand.
Remember: Usenet is a cooperative venture that people set up to converse with
one another.  It's for participants, not simply to be exploited.  When
advertising is clearly an attempt at exploitation rather than participation,
it gets a negative response.

Hostility to advertisement posts has also developed because they have almost
never been confined to the newsgroups where they belong.  If someone is
reading a newsgroup about cats, that doesn't mean he or she wants information
about a stock brokerage.

Even when they do confine their posts to relevant newsgroups, advertisers
frequently post the same message over and over.  Again, that's not why people
are reading Usenet - they're there to talk to each other about a subject
they're interested in.

In many cases, the readers of Usenet articles are paying to get the posts.
Almost certainly the site is paying for its hookup to the network (be that the
Internet or some other way of receiving the articles) and they don't want to
pay again for stuff they've already read.  Remember, unless people respect the
rules, it will cost _your_ site money too!

Besides, if you advertise on Usenet, your product will be in the company of
such wonders as

 (*) Neo-Nazi holocaust revisionist literature.
 (*) "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" = con artists, wire fraud, and Ponzi schemes.
 (*) The services of sleazy lawyers who prey on potential US immigrants by
     charging them for information they can have from the government for free.
 (*) Pornographic videos.

You don't want your company to be perceived as being like that!  Keep your
posts low key, non-repetitive, and _only_ in groups in which they are really
on-topic.  Remember that the other sites (your customers!) are _paying_ to get
Usenet.  You will alienate them if you run roughshod over the Usenet
structure.

If you or one of your site's users really wants to advertise, why don't you
use your net hookup to set up a World Wide Web or Gopher site?  Those are
really much better media for advertisements.  After you've set up your WWW
site, you can post a small message to the appropriate Usenet group calling
attention to it.  Anyone who's really interested will go look at it.

In any event, you're probably thinking the wrong way about the commercial uses
of Usenet anyway.  Forget ads.  _Your_customers_are_talking_about_your_and_
your_competitors'_products._  You will stand to gain quite a lot from just
listening to them, without saying a thing.  For example, don't you think that
Ford could benefit from having an employee read rec.autos?  Companies in the
computer industry have known this for a long time.

6) Which newsgroups should I carry?

Your Usenet site is still your computer.  No one can make you receive, store,
or propagate files that you don't want.  Take only those newsgroups you think
are useful.  As mentioned above, a commercial site probably doesn't want its
employees wasting too much time on non-work related activities.  In that case,
you might for example consider dropping the talk.* hierarchy.  But if you're
at a university, why not carry as many groups as resources allow?

On the other hand, you _really_should_ carry the news.* hierarchy.  If you
don't get it, how can your users read news.announce.newusers?

The alt.* groups are another story.  Some are useful, but many are worthless,
since there are essentially no rules restricting their creation.  (See "So You
Want to Create an Alt Newsgroup" in news.answers.)  If you intend to carry alt
groups on your site, you should probably read the newsgroup alt.config.

The most controversial newsgroup is without a doubt
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - the newsgroup for posting of erotic /
pornographic pictures.  The controversy involves two issues:

 (*) There are many people who intensely dislike pornography, and who
     don't wish it to be available.  Indeed, pornography is illegal in many
     places.
 (*) A large fraction of the images carried in a.b.p.e are in violation of a
     copyright.

If your intention is to ban pornography from your site, you should also take a
look at the group alt.sex.stories to see if you find it acceptable.  If you
expect your site to be frequented by children, you should be especially
careful about what groups they have access to.  (There is a k12.* hierarchy
explicitly intended for schoolchildren.  See section 12 below.)

It is probably impossible to be sure that your site is free from copyright
violations at all times, since you can't read every article coming in.  On the
other hand, some groups are worse than others.  Quite a lot of the stuff in
alt.binaries.sounds.* is questionable too.

Before you decide which groups to carry, be sure that you've read "What are
the legal issues?" in section 11 below.

7) How long should the articles' expiration times be?

You might think that you should set the expiration times as long as you can.
Actually this isn't a great idea.  Usenet flame wars are all too common.
Sometimes a flame war dies down, only to be rekindled when a new reader comes
across old messages on his or her server.  While there is no standard for the
expiration times, try not to make it longer than a few weeks, especially on
alt.* and talk.* groups.

There are some newsgroups on which the above reasoning doesn't apply.
Moderated groups are one kind.  news.answers would be another example.  In
general, its best if a low-volume group has its expiration time set long
enough that the Frequently Asked Questions list (FAQ) and any other periodic
postings in the group are always there.

8) What is "net-abuse"?

This is tricky.  Some people are touchier about these issues than others, and
the conception of net-abuse is constantly evolving.  The basic concept is that
net-abuse is an action that undermines the ability of one or more Usenet
newsgroups to serve as discussion forums.  Whether or not a message is
net-abuse is not a question of the content of the article, but rather the
manner or place of the posting.  There is a consensus that three things are
definitely net-abuse

a) "Spamming" the newsgroups.  A user or group of users is said to have
spammed when he/she/they posts one or more messages with substantially the
same content to a large number of newsgroups, in many of the which the post is
off-topic.

A spamming infraction is more serious if the spam is not cross-posted to the
newsgroups involved, but is instead posted to each group separately.  This
means that the newsreader software at the receiving end will not be able to
determine that the message has already been read in another newsgroup, and the
receiving users will be repeatedly confronted with the post.

A post or posts need not happen all at once to be considered spam.

Usually spamming occurs when a user attempts to use the Usenet as a broadcast
medium, instead of as a forum for discussion and exchange of ideas.  Much of
the poor press coverage of Usenet comes about because of a lack of
understanding of this distinction.  Usenet is not intended as a means of
getting people who are not already interested in a topic to pay attention to
it.

There is no hard and fast definition of "spamming".  However, Usenet groups
are sufficiently distinct that it is quite rare that an article is really
on-topic in more than ten or so groups.

b) Flooding a newsgroup.  This is said to occur when a user or group of users
posts so many messages to a group that it is rendered unusable.  Posts may be
on-topic or not, but if the action prevents other users from exchanging ideas
through that newsgroup, it is considered net-abuse.

c) Sending forged cancels for other people's articles.  Freedom of speech is
respected on Usenet.  Suppressing the voices of others is not allowed.

However, recently a consensus has emerged that there is one exception to the
prohibition against canceling someone else's articles: it is okay to cancel
articles when a massive spamming violation is in progress.  This should never
be done lightly, since it is best if net-abuse is dealt with at the
originating site.

9) What should I do about net-abuse?

You will be expected to keep the users of your site from engaging in
net-abuse.  To this end you should make sure that as news administrator you
are accessible to e-mail, as usenet@your.host.name.

If someone mails you about posts originating from your site, you need not act
on it unless he or she demonstrates an effort to resolve the problem first
with the person making the posts in question.  In general, it is best if
posters resolve complaints among each other, without system administrators
getting involved.  However, if the complaint is a true major emergency, you
should act immediately.

If an abuse is reported to you, you have pretty broad discretion as to how to
handle it.  However, other site administrators will be quite angry if it
doesn't stop quickly.

If someone complains to you about some posts, and you agree that the posts in
question are really net-abuse, then you should send out cancels for the
offending articles, and take action to prevent repetition of the act.  If you
don't believe that the questionable posts are net-abuse, you should send reply
e-mail to the complainer(s) explaining why.

It may occur that a renegade site administrator refuses to make a good-faith
effort to halt net-abuse originating at his or her site.  In that case it is
frequently suggested that other sites stop propagating articles from that site.
This situation is extremely rare, and you will have to deal with it on a case
by case basis. Cutting off a site punishes all the users of that site, not
just the ones involved in net-abuse.

As site administrator you should probably read news.admin.*.  Reading these
groups will keep you informed about net-abuses at other sites, and help you
understand the emerging consensus as to what net-abuse is and how it can be
dealt with.  You may also want to look at alt.current-events.net-abuse.

10) What codes of conduct should I impose on the users of my site?

You have broad discretion in this area.  You definitely can't allow net-abuse,
but there are other posts you mustn't permit either.  For example, you should
stop posts of illegal material - for example, stuff that is copyright
violating, defamatory, or obscene.  There are milder abuses you want to prevent
too.  You will get complaints if a user on your site persists in posting
binary files to a text-only group.  (Depending on the nature of the
infraction, some might say that this is net-abuse, while others might say they
are merely off-topic posts.)

If you are planning to set up a site which sells accounts to users, you will
probably need a legal contract with your users so that they behave properly.
(Get a lawyer for this.  As mentioned above, this document is not legal
advice!)  For example, one Internet access provider has a clause in its user
agreement that reads

"User hereby agrees that any material submitted for publication on [the
provider's site] through User's account(s) does not violate or infringe any
copyright, trademark, patent, statutory, common law or proprietary rights of
others, or contain anything obscene or libelous."

To prevent spamming, the provider puts in its contract

The "use of distribution list in electronic mail or other mass electronic
mailings is subject to approval of [the provider]."

You need to make clear in the contract that you will cut off the user if they
abuse Usenet.  Here's how it looks in this provider's contract:

"[The provider], at its sole business judgment, may [...] suspend User's
access to the service upon any breach of this membership Agreement by User,
including, but not limited to [...] by sole judgement of [the provider] that
User may be performing activities harmful to [the provider] or its users,
employees, vendors, business relationships, or any other users of the
Internet."

If you want to look at user agreements, some Internet access providers have
made theirs available on their gopher/ftp servers.

Make sure your users have read your agreement before they get anywhere near
Usenet.  A user who doesn't intend to abuse Usenet will have no objection to
agreeing to your terms.  Some commercial sites have configured their software
so that new users must read the contract and the netiquette documents _before_
the user is allowed to read or post anything.

Since they tend to be close-knit communities, academic sites generally have
less of a problem dealing with net-abuse issues than other types of sites.  It
is usually within the power of the university to keep students and faculty to
behaving properly.

On the other hand, some academic sites have set up speech codes governing the
actual content of messages.  There is quite a bit of controversy about speech
codes at Universities in general, not just on Usenet.  It's too big an issue
to go into here.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) distributes some
very nice papers discussing these and other issues which you may obtain from
their FTP site, ftp.eff.org in the directory /pub/CAF.  (CAF refers to the
"Computers and Academic Freedom" mailing list.)

11) What are the legal issues?

First of all, since Usenet is international, it is not possible to give a real
answer to this question.  Moreover, to discuss the legal status of Usenet in
even one country would require a much longer document than this one.

There is one overarching question: who is legally responsible for the articles
on a site?  If some freshman at Boondocks University posts the lyrics of a
copyrighted Michael Jackson song, can every single Usenet site be sued for
propagating the copies?

To my knowledge (and I am not a lawyer), in the US at least this question
hasn't been entirely resolved.  There are definitely cases in which bulletin
board owners have gotten into trouble for copyright violations on their
machines.  If your site is sued, the decision in court may hinge in part on
whether or not the site administrator knew that the machine contained illegal
posts.  Everyone is _hoping_ that the poster is held liable, but if the courts
decide otherwise we might finally see the proverbial "film at 11" in which the
end of Usenet comes to pass.

Before you panic however, consider that the courts may hold that a Usenet site
is like a bookstore.  If every bookstore were liable for the contents of every
book on its shelves, no one could sell books.

12) What other things can I do with my Usenet site?

There are other hierarchies besides the "big seven" and alt.  They are
described fully in the "Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies", posted to
news.answers.  They include

 (*) The regional hierarchies, dedicated to issues affecting specific
     geographic areas.
 (*) bionet.* - A set of groups for academic biologists.
 (*) bit.* - These groups echo the bitnet e-mail lists.
 (*) biz.* - Groups in biz.* are set up by corporations to carry material like
     ads for products.  This hierarchy is separated from the big seven because
     it can't be transmitted over the US National Science Foundation's
     network.  (The NSF has restrictions on the sort of things it will carry.
     However, these restrictions are scheduled to go away soon.)
 (*) cbd.* - Commerce and Business Daily, a commercial service.
 (*) clari.* - ClariNet is a commercial service carrying wire service stories
     and other features.
 (*) ddn.* - part of the inet/ddn hierarhy.  Many of the inet groups have
     names that start with comp.*, so they are easily confused with big
     seven groups.
 (*) gnu.* - The Free Software foundation's hierarchy.
 (*) hepnet.* - for high-energy and nuclear physics research sites.
 (*) ieee.* - groups of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
 (*) info.* - a collection of mailing lists gatewayed into news at the
     University of Illinois.  Sites are discouraged from carrying some of
     these.
 (*) k12.* - groups for elementary school children.  Take extra precaution
     with the posts in these groups, children are reading them.
 (*) relcom.* - Russian language posts.  The posts in these groups use 8-bit
     cyrillic characters, so some software adjustments may be necessary.
 (*) u3b.* - groups dealing with AT&T 3B{2,5,15,20,4000} computers. This
     probably should have been under biz.*, but it isn't.
 (*) vmsnet.* - Digital Equipment Corporation's hierarchy for the discussion
     of topics of interest to users of VMS systems.  Another candidate for
     biz.*.

Lastly, you may want to set up your own local hierarchy.  Many universities,
national labs, and commercial providers have done this, to allow internal
discussions.  These hierarchies generally don't propagate out of the
institutions that create them.  (But see the next section!)

13) What are my ongoing responsibilies?

Here's a relatively easy one: You should make sure that your list of
newsgroups is current.  If you find your site on the list of "Sites honoring
invalid newsgroups", posted occasionally to news.announce.newgroups and
news.groups, please fix the problem.

A more complicated issue you will have to contend with is the control of
articles propagated to adjacent Usenet sites.  Consider the following
scenario:

Boondocks University has a news server on news.boon.edu.  It exchanges news
feeds with news.far.com and news.act.ca.  At Boondocks University they get all
the big seven groups, and the alt groups.  At news.act.ca, on the other hand,
they don't want alt.  Now suppose that, without the knowledge of the site
administrator, news.boon.edu begins to get articles from news.far.com in a new
hierarchy, blotz.*.  If news.boon.edu is configured to pass on everything it
gets except alt, (which would be written in the configuration file as
"all,!alt") then they will begin to propagate blotz.* to news.act.ca.

It might be okay for blotz.* to propagate to news.act.ca, but then again it
might not.  For example, the blotz.* hierarchy might be a local hierarchy that
was supposed to be contained within Blotz University, but which got propagated
to news.far.com by accident.  If news.boon.edu propagates it further, it is
just compounding the error.  It is safest if news.boon.edu doesn't
automatically propagate all the articles it receives, at least unless it is
explicitly asked to do so by news.act.ca.  It is best if news.boon.edu
explicitly lists the hierarchies it intends to propagate.

Since there are many sites that pass everything they receive, Usenet is very
"leaky".  This is especially true with respect to the "distribution" feature,
which is supposed to confine articles to given geographic region.  Propagating
too many newsgroups wastes Usenet bandwidth, and makes users wade through
posts they don't need or want.

14) Okay, the software is set up, what do I do now?

_Don't_ just throw the doors open to your users.  If you've read the documents
mentioned in part (2) above, you realize that there are quite a few rules that
have been set up.  They make sense, but they are not always obvious.

_You_, as site-administrator, should be sure your users are prepared to
interact with the Usenet community.  Before _anyone_ from your site posts
anything, he or she should have read the Netiquette documents, posted in
news.announce.newusers.  You should be sure your users know what net-abuse is,
and that they will not be allowed to commit it.  Your users must know how to
send and receive e-mail. (Usenet posters frequently take their discussions
"private" and converse via e-mail.)

By far the most common problem "newbies" encounter is that they often post
questions that have been answered numerous times before.  This is annoying to
people who've been participating in a newsgroup for a long time, and
unfortunately (since Usenet has as many jerks as the rest of the world) the
poster of a such a question will frequently be the recipient of a nasty reply
"flame" message.  This may turn the new user off to Usenet permanently.  Be
sure your users are aware of the FAQ.  Each FAQ is posted periodically to the
newsgroup it covers, and to news.answers.  Furthermore there are FTP archives
of FAQs.  The archives are listed in "Anonymous FTP: Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) List", and in "Introduction to the *.answers newsgroups" which
are in news.announce.newusers.

Make sure that newbies are aware of the existence of news.answers and the
archives.  Also call to their attention the group news.groups.questions, which
is where "Where should I post this message?", "Is there are group about ...?"
questions belong.

Another problem newbies have occurs when they are unaware that a post doesn't
appear immediately on the news server.  They should be informed about this so
that they don't post messages twice.

15) Who wrote this document, anyway?

This document was written by Mitchell Golden (golden@physics.harvard.edu) with
help from

Brad Templeton		(brad@clarinet.com)
S. Nass			(sn@panix.com)