milw.forsale charter milw.forsale is a retro-moderated newsgroup for posting items wanted or for sale in the Metropolitan Milwaukee Area. Acceptable topics for milw.forsale include o offers of sale/barter/giveaway of goods/services o notices of auction o desire to purchase/barter goods/services Articles posted in milw.forsale should be one-time announcements, not recurring advertisements. Recurring ads should be on web pages - then make a one-time announcement about the location of the page. However, it is OK to post an article about the same item up to once a month while it remains unsold, as long as the re-posting is temporary. Articles for the same item should be posted no more often than every 4 weeks because local news sites tend to keep local news articles longer than mainstream (and higher-traffic) UseNet groups. (Also, readers have good memories and don't want to see the same article repeated.) Articles and the items they discuss must have a direct tie to the Milwaukee Metro Area. In particular, this requires that the item is o relatively immobile/unshippable (couches, cars, grand pianos), o located exclusively in the Milwaukee Metro area (apartments, real estate), o of particular interest to area residents (Books such as "Guide to Milwaukee Restaurants"), o the buyer/seller does not want to deal with shipping out of area (perhaps the seller/buyer prefers dealing face-to-face), or o for anything else, it must be for sale from and to the Milwaukee Metro Area or vicinity. If the item does not meet these requirements, it does not matter if the poster thinks that people in the Milwaukee Metro Area might be interested. One person posting from outside the area may not see how their article adds up, but the non-local articles did add up to make this policy necessary. [Credit to the dc.* and sbay.* coordinators for many of the above ideas. Thanks!] For your newsgroups file: milw.forsale Local items for sale in the Milwaukee Metro Area [The remainder of this charter is identical for all milw.* groups] By consensus among the Milwaukee regional Usenet news providers, a charter for the Milwaukee Usenet news hierarchy has been created and implemented, along with appropriate support infrastructure. By late 1998, the utility of the milw.* newsgroups had become questionable, as the group had been turned into a flamewar staging area and battleground, a forum for personal political vendettas of no general interest, and general crosspost dumping grounds. The presence of disruptive elements in the milw.* hierarchy appeared to have driven participation levels down, and the signal-to-noise ratio became very low. Despite the immense number of new users who had gained access to the Usenet via the Internet's explosive popularity, legitimate traffic in milw.* was down substantially over past years. The purpose of a regional hierarchy is for the discussion of items of specific local relevance to a specific geographic area. If an item does not have any particular local relevance, there is almost certainly a much more appropriate non-regional newsgroup in which such a topic should be discussed. If you have such a topic to discuss, you are more than welcome to discuss it - but not here! An example of a topic that has specific local relevance: any of the numerous issues relating to the new Miller Park stadium. An example of a topic that does not have specific local relevance: discussion of President Clinton's involvement with Monica Lewinsky (unless they were at the Milwaukee Hilton during the time in question). The Milwaukee Metropolitan ("Metro") area is defined as Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties, the southern portions of Ozaukee and Washington Counties, and the northern portion of Racine County. Milwaukee Metro area residents should include the entire charter of the group in question when complaining to posters about charter violations. * Note that most Internet Service Providers and Network Service Providers have an Acceptable Use Policy that requires users to comply with newsgroup charters. Violation of this charter may result in consequences up to and including the loss of your Internet access for the violation of this or any other Usenet newsgroup or hierarchy charter. This hierarchy is unmoderated for residents of the Milwaukee Metro area, as defined above. However, some articles do not qualify as local even when posted from the Milwaukee Metro Area. The exceptions are: 1) Excessively cross-posted articles, 2) Excessively multiple-posted articles, 3) Articles cross-posted to other regional newsgroups outside of Wisconsin, and 4) Articles that do not have particular relevance to the Milwaukee Metro Area, unless posted to milw.talk. This hierarchy is retro-moderated for non-local articles, defined as articles posted from outside the Milwaukee Metro Area. This charter permits the milw.* Usenet News Administrators to cancel any article posted in the milw.* hierarchy which does not have particular relevance to the Milwaukee Metro Area, or is in violation of a relevant milw.* charter. Any Milwaukee Metro area resident may send e-mail to the poster and/or their site's news admins for milw.* charter violations. Please include a copy of the group's charter with such a complaint, and a courtesy copy to is requested. The following types of net abuse are severe wastes of bandwidth. As many smaller sites are connected via slow dial-up links, and may be paying per-minute charges, this charter allows for the on-sight cancellation of any of the following abuses: 1) "Make Money Fast" (MMF) chain letters and pyramid/Ponzi schemes. Such schemes are Federal felonies. On Usenet, promoting waste of bandwidth is the equivalent of a crime because the system would break down if such acitivty was left unchecked. 2) Binaries, such as uuencoding or MIME base 64. An exception is made for a PGP digital signature of a cleartext message, and further exceptions may be made for other digital signature technologies that are developed. 3) MIME/HTML posts, and in particular any posting using a content- encoding other than 7bit, 8bit, or quoted-printable. Most users reading Usenet do not use a Web browser, and HTML is difficult or impossible to read to interpret the content. Some posters who post HTML also include a plaintext version of the message. This is redundant and wasteful. Please save HTML for the Web. 4) "spew", the reposting of old articles with new Message-ID's. 5) "test" messages, except for test messages posted to milw.test. Advertisements are disallowed unless the group charter explicitly allows for advertising, in which case the specific guidelines set forth by the charter prevail. Crossposting limits are set forth in the policy document mentioned below. This hierarchy charter is available on the Web as http://usenet.mil.wi.us/hier-charter Details of current administrative policies are available on the Web as http://usenet.mil.wi.us/policy The charters for each individual group are available on the Web as http://usenet.mil.wi.us/[group]-charter Thank you for your attention. Your Milwaukee Metropolitan Usenet News Administrators