Guide for Writing an alt. Newsgroup Proposal
Eugene A. Calame
This guide is intended to help you write a newgroup proposal in a form that will
provide concise information to system administrators.
The first step in creating an alt.* newsgroup, after reading the FAQ's, is to
write and send a proposal to the newsgroup alt.config. The proposal is submitted
to the newsgroup alt.config for critique by peers and system administrators so
that errors, if any, can be corrected before a newgroup control message is sent.
The final product of the process will be the newgroup control message.
You have total control over how you present your newgroup proposal. All
responses to your proposal are advisory only. Present it as if you are selling
an idea to Usenet news system administrators. That is what you are doing. It is
in your interest to present the proposal in a form they expect and appreciate.
There will, in all likelihood, be several responses to your proposal. Responses
may, or may not, be from system Administrators; most will not. Consider the
responses carefully and if you think they are good ideas incorporate them into
your newgroup control message.
Do not respond to post that are rude and insulting. There are a few participants
in the process that seem to have no other purpose in life but to respond in such
a manner. Ignore them.
Pasted below is a template that will guide you in writing such a proposal. The
template can be found at http://www.faqs.org/usenet/alt/example.html where it
is posted as a guide in creating and sending a newgroup contol message.
A quick checklist for you proposal.
1.Newsgroups are organized in hierarchies. Most general to most specific.
Using alt.penpals.forty-plus-yrs as an example.
1.alt. Is the primary and most general hierarchy.
2.penpals Is the secondary hierarchy and more specific than alt.
3.forty-plus-yrs Is the third level hierarchy and most specific.
2.Try not to start a new second level hierarchy. You can find a list of
almost all newsgroups at ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/newsgroups that may
help you place your newsgroup.
3.Hierarchies are separated by dots (peroids).
4.There can be no more than twenty characters between dots.
5.All characters must be made up only of the lower case characters " a-z ",
symbols " . " (dot), " - " (minus), " + " (plus) and Digits 0 through 9.
6.No hierarchy level should be all digits.
An example of an acceptable newsgroup name is.... alt.penpals.forty-plus-yrs .
In this case penpals is the secondary hierarchy and second most general. The
more specific forty-plus-yrs is the third level hierarchy.
----------------------------------sample proposal below--------------
Newsgroups: alt.config,
Subject: [PROPOSAL] {name of newsgroup being created}
=======================================================
Comments:
who you are, your e-mail address, and what the focus of the newsgroup will be.
Three to four lines describing the purpose of the newsgroup.
When, if, you send the control message you should add to this section the
message ID, and date, that the proposal received when you posted it to
alt.config. Mention any changes that were made to the originl proposal, if any,
due to suggestion made in alt.config.
For your newsgroups file:
newsgroup name A few words describing the newsgroup.
{ Follow the format above exactly; copy the first line verbatim, and on the
second line give the name of the newsgroup, followed by 8 spaces or an eight
space tab, followed by a few words describing the group and a period. Do not run
over the end of the 80 character maximun line! Make sure there are no carrige
return and line feeds}
Charter:
The purpose of the charter is to define what topics are (or are not)
appropriate for the newsgroup, and to state any applicable policies of
the newsgroup.
YOu might add the following, copy and past, from the faq at
http://www.alt-config.org/
Unmarked off-topic materials, binaries, advertising (spam), excessive
posting, cancel attacks, virus infected binaries, html-encoded postings, and
abusive cross postings are prohibited.
All posts (messages) must be in plain text only and be human-readable.
Justification of Readership:
Here you should include numerical evidence that there is substantial
online interest in the topic of the newsgroup. If the topic is covered
by an existing newsgroup, mailing list, or other discussion forum, you
should also explain why the existing forum is no longer adequate for
the purpose.
This also applies to creating a specialized subgroup of a more general
newsgroup; you should explain why the split is necessary ("we
don't want to use the general group" is not considered an adequate
reason-- only a high volume of traffic in the general group, and/or a
high percentage of that traffic being on this specific sub-topic, is
considered a valid justification for a split).
------------end of proposal -------------------------
Examples that ignore these conventions are many. However the goal is to get your
newsgroup accepted by all news servers. Because these conventions were not
followed a few of the exceptions will never be carried, by some news servers,
because the system administrators will not accept them.
That's it for the proposal. For more information see
http://www.geocities.com/nnqweb/ncreate.html
--
Eugene A. Calame eaca...@excite.com http://www.geocities.com/eacalame/
Austin, Texas USA Click http://www.thehungersite.com/index.html to help.
Please ask your ISP to add the newsgroup alt.religion.salvation-army