milw.general charter

milw.general is a retro-moderated newsgroup for topics related to the
Milwaukee Metro Area which are not already covered by another milw.* 
newsgroup.  It is an error to crosspost articles between milw.general 
and any other milw.* group.  Articles posted should be directly and 
specifically related to the Milwaukee Metro Area.  For articles that 
are of more general interest, there are tens of thousands of other 
newsgroups to choose from.

For your newsgroups file:
milw.general	Topics specific to 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 <news@usenet.mil.wi.us> 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
<milw@usenet.mil.wi.us>