Posting Guidelines

[alt.atheism.moderated]

Welcome to alt.atheism.moderated. This newsgroup is intended to be a
less noisy, higher quality version of alt.atheism.

You don't have to be an atheist or an agnostic to post here; you are
welcome to put across a religious point of view, so long as you make a
sincere effort at genuine debate.

Posts can be send via e-mail to a...@infidels.org.

Firstly, here are a few guidelines to consider when posting:

* Please send any comments to the moderator as a separate message.
PLEASE DO NOT ATTACH THEM TO A MESSAGE SUBMITTED TO THE NEWSGROUP.
I telnet in to moderate the newsgroup, and I often get a very slow
connection. This makes stripping comments out very tedious.

* Try and make sure your articles have a replyable From: address.
Understandably, due to the SPAM problem of USENET, many posters
choose not to put a viable replyable adress. The moderator accepts
this, but can not reply by e-mail if a post is not approved.

* Please try to keep the line length of material you post to 72
columns or less. This allows plenty of space for people to quote
you and still not overflow 80 columns.

* Please put new text BELOW, not above, quoted text. The server
will not accept posts with more quoted than new text.

* Please do not use supercite to put people's names in front of
every line of text you quote. It turns into a horrible mess
when other people quote it, and some people find it extremely
annoying.

* Avoid 'cutesy' abbreviations, like using "u" instead of "you",
"2" instead of "to", and the like. It's hard to read.

* Avoid tab characters. They are often lost during transit to me,
or converted to three spaces by my text editor. In fact, you
shouldn't use tab characters in Usenet postings at all, as even
if they make it to the reader, there's no guarantee his terminal
will have the same tab settings yours has.

* If you wish to use accented characters, I would encourage you
to use a newsreader which understands ISO-8859-1 characters (a
superset of ASCII, and also known as 'Latin 1'). Not all systems
can cope with accented characters, but if we all use them the
sites running old software will be encouraged to upgrade. If you
see '|' as a u with an umlaut, your software understands
ISO-8859-1.

* The moderator considers SPAM to be a grave problem threatening
USENET, and handles SPAM posts very seriously. All SPAM posts are
forwarded to the system administrator of the originating system, and
some are also forwarded to the appropriate criminal and taxation
authorities.

* Many users' nntp servers do not receive all approved posts. This is
a USENET wide problem by no means limited to a.a.m. If your system
does not receive a post, please check Google Groups (formerly Deja)
<http://groups.google.com> before either resubmitting or requesting
a resubmission.

Now, a few rules concerning articles which will be bounced:

1. Postings consisting of material covered by the FAQ files will be
bounced. FAQs can be found at http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/.

2. Postings which are purely preaching, with no attempt at discussion
or debate, will be bounced.

3. Postings which are just abuse or ridicule will be bounced.

4. Arguments over the 'correct' or 'true' definition of words will be
rejected. You can, of course, try to arrive at a mutually
acceptable definition of a word. However, sometimes the process
turns into something like: "It means X" "Sez you! It means Y"
"My dictionary says X!" "My encyclopedia says Y!". Those sorts
of postings will be bounced.

5. No cross-posts can be approved. Cross-posts to other moderated
newsgroups cause problems because the USENET software doesn't handle
them properly (an approval from one moderator forges approval to other
moderated groups involved). Cross-posts to unmoderated groups are
problematic as threads develop differently due to the lack of
restriction on postings. Post the article separately to each group.

6. Postings which do not fit into 80 columns will be bounced. Quoted text
may overflow past column 80; I won't reformat it.

7. Postings where the included text exceeds the new text by a factor
of 1.5 or more will be bounced, unless the quoted text is a
single sentence or paragraph of up to ten lines. Also, please do
not quote other posters' signature files (unless commenting on
them). Other than spam, this is the biggest reason posts are
bounced.

8. Postings which do not contain paragraphs, or are all in upper case,
will be bounced.

9. Please try to write in the third person. Postings which appear to
be private e-mail messages mistakenly sent to the newsgroup will be
bounced. Ideally, posts should be written "to" the thousands of
readers of alt.atheism.moderated, not just the previous poster in
a thread.

10. Posts which are sent in HTML or contain binary files. Please send
posts in ASCII only.

11. Please cite the author, either formally, or informally ("John wrote:")
when quoting text of prior threads on the newsgroup.

Thanks for reading this posting.

THOUGHTfully Yours,
Clark Adams -=Internet Infidel=- Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
cad...@NOSPAMinfidels.org Moderator, alt.atheism.moderated