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This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing. Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [y / n] – Warning message displayed by original “nn” newsgroup program before posting; Big Dummy’s Guide To The Internet, 1993.
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Basic posting advice is that you should read a newsgroup for awhile before posting to it, and always choose a good subject header.
You should usually read a newsgroup for a few days to get an idea of the topics and tone before posting to it so that your message will be best prepared and received. To post a new message, select the “new message” menu item, type your message, and then select “send”. To view your message in the newsgroup you usually have to close the group in your news reader and then reopen it to get a fresh download of the group messages.
Over the course of a few hours, your message will be propagated across the Usenet to all of the other news servers carrying that newsgroup. You can check back in a few hours or days to see if your message has generated any replies as a thread of discussion. Sometimes people will reply to the content of your message without replying to your specific message, in which case they will often reference your message subject line in theirs.
Most people read messages based on their subject line, so choose a good, descriptive subject. It should be specific and meaningful, not be too long, and not contain too many special characters like stars or exclamation points. If you have not used Usenet before, you can try composing and posting some test messages and then replying to them in the test groups.
Historical. Older news readers let you set the distribution category to specify that a message posting shouldn’t get distributed on the Internet beyond a specific geographic area, as shown below:
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Category |
Distribution |
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can |
limited to Canada |
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eunet |
limited to EUNet sites |
| na | limited to North America |
| usa | limited to United States |
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world |
unlimited distribution |
Resources. Other resources related to posting:
Some people have become infamous in parts of the online community for inventive, outrageous, amusing, or otherwise interesting posts, such as those below: