Is there a place I can view charters for orhter newsgroups?
ca...@dsl-only.net
there someplace that lists all the respective charters for each newsgroup.
I'm assuming that each group defined a charter when it was created and not all
seem to post them regularly as they do here?
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Jon Bell
>Other than "lurking" for a few weeks to understand what a newsgroup is about, is
>there someplace that lists all the respective charters for each newsgroup.
You can find an archive of charters for comp, humanities, misc, news,
rec, sci, soc and talk groups at
ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/
Actually this is the news.announce.newgroups archive, which contains all
proposals and vote results for new groups in those hierarchies, regardless
of whether they succeeded or not. It goes back to only about 1991, but
before the mid-1990s new groups usually had rather sketchy charters
anyway. Charters were originally invented so as to give people voting on
newsgroup proposals a way of seeing what they were voting on, not as a
quasi-legal document that defines in painstaking detail what is and is not
"permitted" in a newsgroup. They sort of evolved into that role as a
result of people using them to justify complaints to ISPs about off-topic
postings.
(And some very old newsgroups have no formal charter at all, because they
predate the beginnings of the current mechanism for proposing and votong
on new groups.)
For other kinds of groups (particularly "alt" groups), see the
control-message archive at
ftp://ftp.isc.org.pub/usenet/control/
The usual convention is that the *first* "newgroup" control message for a
group defines its charter.
--
Jon Bell <jtb...@presby.edu> Presbyterian College
Dept. of Physics and Computer Science Clinton, South Carolina USA
Graham Drabble
>Other than "lurking" for a few weeks to understand what a newsgroup
>is about, is there someplace that lists all the respective charters
>for each newsgroup.
The URL <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/(hierarchy-name)/(group-
name).Z> should work. They are .Z files and can be opened with most
versions of WinZip or PKZip.
--
Graham Drabble