Re: Newsgroup Nazi

That's not the point. If you had crossposted to 100 newsgroups, then
nearly everybody who responded to your message (who was an Agent user)
would have had their reply bounce.

Standards exist for a good reason. For example, I like to drive on the
left side of the road, but when I visit the USA I defer to local
custom. Sometimes there really is no room for individual expression
...

BTW, you are not alone with your NG problems. Many years ago I was
with an ISP called OneNet. NoneNet had not allocated enough disc
capacity to their Usenet service, which meant that more often than not
I was unable to post messages. When my posts did go through, they were
not being relayed to the wider Internet, which meant that only other
NoneNet users were seeing them. A visit to the Usenet archives at
DejaNews confirmed my suspicions.

- Franc Zabkar

---
Friendly advice is one thing, blocking a legitimate post is quite
another.
---

---
No, accepted Usenet practice is _not_ cancelling a post because of a
breach of netiquette.
---

---
Just because your ISP doesn't carry sbcglobal.help.tech.newsgroups
doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
---

---
Yeah, goos idea.  That makes it _really_ convenient for whoever's
pushing you into the oven.

I have no problem with that, it just sounds like a bit of friendly
advice to me. He's merely restating accepted Usenet practice. BTW,
it's also considered bad netiquette to crosspost excessively (I had to
resend this message because of "non-existent newsgroups").

If I were testing my Usenet access, I'd just send a regular message,
or reply to an existing thread. If the message doesn't appear in my
normal newsfeed, then I'd look for it at Google Groups. BTW, I don't
necessarily agree with all the netiquette guidelines, but I observe
them anyway. I reckon if I can annoy the least number of people my
life will be a lot easier.

- Franc Zabkar

I've had a DSL line for a year or so, supplied by SBC Internet
Services, and I'm really pleased with it.  I was using another ISP for
outgoing email and news, and yesterday I decided to save a few bucks
by dropping the other ISP and running everything through SWB. No
problem; everything worked fine except the connection to Usenet,
through Prodigy, which was (is) so crappy that I didn't see any new
posts on sed or abse for hours after I hooked up with prodigy's news
server.

So, I thought, maybe something's wrong on my end.  In order to check
it out I decided to send some test posts to see if they'd make it
through, and here's what I found in my inbox shortly after that:

<QUOTE>

FYI,
 Please be advised that posting tests to discussion
groups is considered poor netiquette. There are test
groups set aside for posting tests.  Please retry your
test to sbcglobal.test, or alt.test.  For binary test
posts please use alt.test.binaries.
 All unmoderated groups work the same way so if a post
works to a test group it should work in any group. On
the rare occasion where a test must be made to a
discussion group, please post a short on-topic message
as your test.  Your test post would have been successful
had it not been filtered out.
 If you are having problems with or questions regarding
newsgroups please post your concerns to;

news://sbcglobal.help.tech.newsgroups

or email news-support@sbcglobal.net

Common problems and fixes may be found at;

http://newsgroups.news.prodigy.com

Thank You,