A History of Some Usenet Rules

Or - where some conventions and "netiquette" come from and why people are so religious about it, and why it actually makes some sense...

People that are new to Usenet often wonder about the conventions and rules for doing things - many of them seem odd and arbitrary and don't make much sense until you get used to them. Even then they don't make much sense but at least you get to know what they are. Many are simply things that have to do with basic politeness or civilized behavior - I won't go into those here. What I want to talk about are some of the things that seem unnecessary but have become part of the culture for historical reasons - and still make sense on some level, but sometimes don't seem to. I hope this will help explain some of those seemingly arbitrary rules.

One thing to remember if you are new to Usenet, or even if you aren't - when people lay into you for doing something out of order and are mean about it, they are probably not the expert or the authority that they claim to be. Most "real" authorities will wait til at least the second offense to skin you in public over doing something against the rules, and will point you to the FAQ or send a polite reminder. Apologize to the group, read the faq, and find out whether your tormentor is just a self-proclaimed policy cop or the actual founder of the group before getting into an argument. Even then, arguments don't do anyone any good. Read the FAQ, lurk and learn for a day or two, get to know the tone of the group and the real "owner" contributors before posting.

This discussion is mainly about bandwidth. In the early days of the Usenet, before it was the Usenet and for a while afterward, bandwidth was everything - due to the costs associated with moving data around between systems, and the miniscule amounts of ready-access storage available. Today, many of the same principles still apply, but for different reasons - there is so much data available that it's increasingly difficult to sort it out and find the articles that you are interested in. The ability to move mountains of data around casually has resulted in the need to enforce discipline in bandwidth use much the same as the old technical requirements did, just to keep newsgroups from becoming garbage bins. Therefore, many of the "Old Rules" still make sense, but for different reasons - and they are cherished and enforced by social means rather than physical ones in a lot of the Usenet newsgroups. Have you ever been "Flamed" for "Top Posting" and wondered what the Heck they were talking about? Read on.

I've been participating in Usenet for a long time, though I've never had more than a peripheral involvement, I'm an old timer but not some sort of Old God Of The Internet or anything. As an observer and long time lurker, and sometime contributor, then - here are some things I've picked up over the years.

Almost all of Netiquette grew out of necessity. It became tradition, and as the older users became less active, the newer users were taught to do things "the right way" and they passed these traditions along, and now a vast number of Usenet users know that there are all these rules, but not why anyone should care about the issues addressed by the rules.

A lot of the basic forms and conventions come from historical limitations and mechanics of the system itself. In 1977 I got ahold of a login to the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) when I attended a computer science seminar at a school on the east coast. For a while, I used it to access public bulletin boards on what was, years later, to become the Usenet that we know and love - using a cuff modem I built attached to my Timex/Sinclair. Long Distance - from the west coast. I enjoyed it for a year or so before the login I was using got stripped off when someone did a cleanup of "unused" accounts.

The bulletin boards were little more than directories of text files that got copied back and forth to the various machines on the network, usually by very laborious means, copying the files ("articles") around from computer to computer by phone lines from systems that were connected to Arpanet (the government / military / university network that later became the internet) to systems that were not so fortunate. I would never have dared to actually post an article. It was extremely expensive for the system owners - some estimates put the cost of propigation in those days at nearly a dollar a word once you added up the computer time and phone charges incurred by all the parties. I was content to listen in though. The people who posted things were professors and grad students, on all sorts of odd subjects. I was sure if I had actually posted anything I would probably have lost the login I was using to lurk.

Anyway - back to the topic - it was this sheer expense of transmission, lack of available storage, and difficulty of retrieval that is the foundation of many of the "rules" of netiquette - based on a very strong prohibition against wasting bandwidth and storage. At that time, such waste would have been a capital offense. It would have been possible to perform a Denial Of Service attack on many of those systems by simply opening a file and typing until the system storage was overwhelmed and the system crashed. It happened by accident quite often - though there were some safeguards to prevent this sort of thing, by today's standards they were very crude.

In the years that followed, more and more institutions and organizations got involved. The Arpanet expanded, which made it possible for more and more systems to participate in BBS/News communications, and even individual email. Systems with local public or private networks that were not connected to the Arpanet began communicating with those that were, by phone line, downloading or uploading packets of messages at predetermined times. Standards for these communications began to emerge. As far as Usenet goes, the most important things to be developed were the NNTP standard (for systems connected to the Arpanet) and the UUCP standard (for Store-and-Forward networks of unconnected systems by phone lines or even tape). There are numerous articles out there about the "Net.Gods" that accomplished all this, and the emergence of TCP, IP, NNTP, SMTP, UUCP, etc., etc. that made the modern Internet possible, and the transports now used by Usenet.

I started paying attention and participating in earnest in the mid 1980's - there were already a lot of people using UUnet back then, mostly college students and instructors who had access to computers that were networked into Arpanet or were UUCP points. UUCP was the main scheme for distributing news at that time. It consisted of a series of individuals and organizations with resources to spend on it, that transferred packets of articles in a structured way so that they could be kept in grouped, threaded form, much like they are now. This "Store-and-Forward Network" operated over phone lines - each point would recieve packets of articles, install them into their server on their local or semi public network, and pass the packet to another system or systems over the phone line. Starting up a new point would start you from scratch, unless you could talk a System Operator into sending you a tape of archives. Almost all colleges and universities had a UUCP point, and some had public diallup access to a BBS that exposed it.

At around that time, I had a BBS that I ran out of my living room, and I learned about a system (called FIDOnet) that was side-hacked into the UUnet and that I could actually participate in. I carried a few newsgroups on my BBS. It was fairly expensive as a sysop to participate - to get and send packets of articles by making long distance calls (at least we had blazing fast 2400 bps modems and 286 computers to do it with by then). I had to pick and choose groups that had a high signal-to-noise ratio, not much junk and many interesting articles for it to be worth doing at all. "comp.*" groups mostly.

The sysops that were actually carrying the "backbone", and transferring, storing, and accepting posts to large groups, like the "rec.*" groups, and later the "alt.*" groups, were paying reasonably large amounts of money to participate. A much larger side-hacked system than FIDOnet, BITNET, also started up at the time in the same sort of way but with a lot more traffic, and a proportionately larger number of "newbies", and non-technical users. The result of these other networks becoming attached to the UUNet backbone, and major services like CompuServe also connecting eventually, and the growing usage of the backbone system at the universities, was that the UUnet (around that time changing to Usenet) started taking on more and more traffic, and the traffic was much more social and informal (i.e. non-important to we geeks) in nature. With so many more users posting articles, the load on the "backbone" sysops and admins got larger and larger.

As the traffic increased, The Rules had to be laid down to keep users from driving the sysops into bankruptcy by abusing their posting privileges. You often would not be chastised or reprimanded for breaking The Rules, you would simply be banished. You would not be able to post any longer. Even the "point" system that you received / sent articles from could just be taken off the list and no longer allowed to participate if it originated a lot of frivolous traffic. The sysops, admins, and moderators who were "paying the postage" had absolute power over your ability to participate. Keep in mind, a lot of the traffic was pretty frivolous in nature - newsgroups of jokes, sweaty-palms discussions of a prurient nature hopefully between consenting adults, etc. - but the sysops who wanted some channels of garbage only wanted the exact kind of garbage they were willing to pay for - no more.

At present, the way the internet works and the sheer volume of people participating make it hard for any one person to be removed or their posting privileges revoked. Complaints to your ISP can lose you your account - but there are a lot of ISPs out there - and most ISPs won't do anything about behavior complaints, in order to lose your account you have to be caught posting child pornography or mp3s of copyrighted recordings. Generally, if you annoy people in a group, they will simply individually *plonk* you. What this means is that they will set a killfilter so that any posts from you will not be displayed. If your offense is egregious enough, they may even notify you that you have been plonked - pretty insulting, as it means that any reply you make will go unread - you are "talking to the hand".

The system of UUCP Store and Forward networks was completely replaced by the internet in about 1989, and many of the rules were no longer strictly necessary because of the immense increase in bandwidth and availability of the system. There were still limits though, and the rules remained as common courtesy rather than absolute law. Today many even seem silly, with the immense amount of bandwidth available, binary files well into the hundreds or thousands of megabytes being posted routinely, and high connection speeds becoming the norm rather than the exception, even when using modem / phone line connections. When the rules were laid down, the average connection was with a 2400 bps modem - higher than that was very rare - the low end of the spectrum now, a 54kbps modem, is 2333% faster.

Along with the relaxation of the technical limitations in bandwidth however, came such an explosion of content that another kind of bandwidth - the attention of the users of a newsgroup - became just as precious. So many of the same rules laid down to protect the data transfer bandwidth have morphed into rules that prevent newsgroups from becoming unusable simply because there is too much information to sort through as it comes in. The attention paid to many of these conventions varies widely from group to group. As always - Read the FAQ, Lurk and learn (read posts in the group for a while before posting), get a feel for the conventions generally agreed on in a particular group before posting to it.

Basically, The Number One Rule was: "Never post anything that costs the system bandwidth that isn't budgeted by us for what you want to do." Here are three most basic of the branches of that Rule that later branched into many, many Rules of Netiquette:

Thou shalt not post off-topic!
This has been "sub-rule number one" forever. Initially, it was because sysops that literally paid for the transmission and storage of newsgroups did not want to pay for articles on a topic other than what they wanted. Even from the beginning though, it was also a pain for users who read and participated in the groups to have to download posts they weren't interested in to sort them out. For a user on a slow modem, it could take hours to download the messages for an active group (it was not always possible to be able to download just headers - my system allowed it but many didn't) and the downloads of things like that were often metered - remember back then most people paid by the minute for connect time - so users had to pay for the unwanted material against their wishes.

Today, it's just as important. There are so many people posting, that off-topic posts create a wall of noise between the users that are looking for articles or conversation about a particular topic and the information that they are looking for. It's terribly easy to forget - once you get into a conversational thread that wanders off-topic for the group you are posting to - but it is everybody's responsibility to help keep the noise level down. In many groups such free ranging threads are tolerated or even encouraged - but in others they are not. Anytime a thread you are involved in starts to veer off topic for the group - a good rule of thumb is to change the subject line of the thread to "OT:[subject]" or "Off Topic:[subject]" and offer to resume the discussion somewhere that it is on topic.

Thou shalt not Cross-post!
There are a couple different ways to crosspost at present - there used to be just one. And it was Bad. That is, creating a message, and posting copies of that message to several different groups. With very little effort, you could create a bandwidth load equal to posting a hundred messages with one post. Currently, it's possible to cross-post "properly" with some news client programs, which is to post a message so that the header shows in more than one newsgroup, but all those headers point to the same message body. So the mechanics of crossposting are not as harmful if it's done properly, but still - there are good reasons to think twice before doing it. First among these is that it is literally spamming if done to excess, and there's a fine line between acceptable and excess. Crossposting to a lot of groups is commonly done by spammers and trolls, so a lot of posts that are crossposted to many groups are often blocked by good news servers as well.

A good rule of thumb is that if you are tempted to crosspost a message to more than 2 groups, you should think hard about whether it's worth being called potentially a spammer for doing it - or having your post trashed by a number of servers out of hand. If you are the press officer for an organization like GreenPeace and you crosspost your articles to the entire alt.ecology.* tree, that's one thing. If you just found a TV show that you really like and you crosspost to the entire alt.tv.* hierarchy, that's kind of another thing... Find the right audience for your post and put it there and only there. That's my advice.

Some correlaries along these lines -
Multiple posting -
Posting the same message to the newsgroup over and over because no one seems to have responded to it - If someone were going to respond, they would have to the first message. Don't beat a dead horse.

The Billboard post/request -
Posting a message with the same or similar subject line several times to make a pretty little pattern in the header list. No - you didn't think of it first. Many, Many people will killfilter you immediately just so they won't have to look at it. That may seem a little harsh, but it's one of those things that just starts to annoy you on sight after the first couple thousand times you've seen it.

Thou shalt not quote!
There are an awful lot of conventions and mini-rules that have grown out of this, some of them quite subtle and smelling slightly of anti-newbie bias - and others that have good sound reasons for being there. Basically, it's the practice of including a previous post or whole tree of posts in your message, and adding some little comment at the top (what you'll see in a lot of groups disparaged as "top-posting") - so that you wind up posting a great huge article just so you can say "Me, too!" or "Hear, Hear!" or "That was funny!". Early on, it was a major usage-of-bandwidth problem to have people doing this. Many of the groups in the early days, especially moderated ones, had absolute rules against replying to articles at all, because of this problem. You could lose your posting privileges over it.

The trouble is (and this is where I see anti-newbie bias all the time, people getting castigated in public for it) that almost everyone who starts off looking at and posting to Usenet newsgroups does so with Outlook Express - the out-of-the-box default NewsReader for a vast majority of the computing public. Outlook Express does this by default - Quotes the entire article being replied to, and adds the "new" message at the top. To keep from doing so requires reconfiguring Outlook Express. Details on that are addressed in a different article. If you do need to quote an article that you are replying to in order to make your point, you really must take the effort to snip out each point that you address, quote it, and place your reply after it. Personally, I like simply reading each message in a thread without having to wade through masses of quoted segments from previous messages, and I can see why there are rules against quoting - but with cheap bandwidth, "top-posting" is a pretty forgivable sin.

Rule of thumb - quote as little of previous messages as you need to in order to provide context for your comments. If it's not necessary, don't quote at all.

Some correlaries along these lines -
In Binaries - The The "Here's What I Have" post -
This really is a deadly sin. It will make people passionately hate or despise you. You will be ignored by everyone who seriously posts to the group. Every time I see one of these that actually gets the fills posted I cringe, because I know that others will see it having worked and will do it themselves. Here's the scenario: (L)user A downloads part of a binary file and can't complete all of the segments necessary to complete the file which was posted as a segmented archive (set of RAR or mp3 files, etc.). (L)user A then reposts everything that they did manage to get, with a note (especially irritating if it's in a 0 file or other file, not in the subject of all the posts) saying, "Here's part 01 through part 23 of 'X', someone please upload the missing parts"...

Everyone who downloads their post without realizing it's incomplete, now becomes an ally in persuading someone to post the fills necessary to complete the fileset. This is really abhorrent behavior. You should Never, Ever, start a binary post that you know you cannot complete. An exception is if someone else requests a part or parts that you have, it would be perfectly OK to repost the requested parts, with a subject something like "Here's the part 12 and 19 you requested, can you or anyone else please post parts 24-29?".

There are many other examples of this sort of abuse. Examine what you are going to do and why before posting anything. Ask yourself, "Am I contributing, or just coercing someone else into giving?"

The Bottom Line -
Read a lot of newsgroups before you post to any. Read a lot of FAQs before you start to post. There's a vast wasteland of garbage out there, and diamonds sparkling amongst it - pay attention to how the system works, and make your contributions to it diamonds instead of garbage. It will make the whole thing better for all of us!

--technogeek