Current Administrative Policies of the milw.* Usenet Newsgroup Hierarchy - Table of Contents Purpose milw.* Newsgroup Charters Creating New milw.* Newsgroups Policies on Advertising Netiquette Usage Restrictions Forms of Net Abuse Crossposting Limits Who May Cancel Articles? Repeat Offender Policy The milw.* CleanupBot This Document - Purpose The milw.* Usenet newsgroups are a regional news hierarchy covering the Milwaukee Metropolitan ("Metro") area of Wisconsin. All regional hierarchies on Usenet were created for the use of their local areas and may have additional rules of use. The milw.* newsgroups do have additional restrictions which were put in place as a result of past abuses. Primarily, all the milw.* newsgroups have a requirement that articles must be relevant to the Milwaukee Metro Area and applicable to the topic of the newsgroup. - milw.* Newsgroup Charters Each newsgroup also has its own more detailed charter which extends this basic requirement. The charters are the rules and must be followed. Any member of the local community may respond via e-mail to charter violations. Members are asked not to post complaints about charter violations. If parts of a charter are found to be undesirable or become outdated, the administrators may implement appropriate changes or adjustments. - Creating New milw.* Newsgroups As with most local news hierarchies, there is no voting procedure for creating new newsgroups. Discussion in milw.config is the determining factor on whether a newsgroup will be created or not. 1) Anyone with a proposal for a new milw.* newsgroup should post an article in milw.config. 2) Expect the discussion to change your proposal. 3) The administrators will observe for evidence that the discussion convinces other people to support it. (So be on your best behavior!) 4) If there appear to be sufficient support in the community for the proposal, the newsgroup will be created by the administrators. Please be sure to take into account whether a given subject is already covered by an existing newsgroup in milw.*, wi.* or any global hierarchies. - Policies on Advertising The policy on advertising in milw.* is different for local and non-local articles. Advertisements which do not state and have any specific relation to the Milwaukee Metro Area are prohibited in the milw.* newsgroups. Advertisements which are specific to the Milwaukee Metro Area are allowed but have some restrictions. Ads may not be reposted with the same or similar content within a 4-week period because many news servers keep articles for their own local newsgroups for a longer expiration period. Ads which are different or significantly updated but from the same organization should not be posted more often than 2 weeks after the previous one, in order to make efficient use of network bandwidth. For the most efficient use of network bandwidth, advertisements should use the World-Wide Web instead of Usenet, because WWW is more efficient for wide-area or targeted broadcasts. - Netiquette There are currently no moderated newsgroups in the milw.* hierarchy. Standard Usenet netiquette guidelines apply. (See the news.announce.newusers newsgroup.) As with any other unmoderated newsgroup, conflicts should be avoided. When they occur, they should be resolved among the residents in a mature fashion - the administrators will not intervene except to oppose cases of net abuse. - Usage Restrictions In the late 1990's, various problems with spamming, off-topic posts, and other forms of abuse became a serious problem in the milw.* groups. It became clear that the traffic volume from net abuse grew to the point that local readers were obviously going away and not reading the milw.* newsgroups any more. Discussion dropped to next to nothing. It was getting pretty obvious that if no action was taken, the newsgroups would have died out. The administrators and participants have begun a more active approach to oppose net abuse in the milw.* newsgroups. This policy attempts to strike a balance between one side with self-restraint and caution and the other side with firm enforcement of newsgroup policy. 1) Since the worst offending articles are cross-posted to an excessive number of non-milw.* newsgroups, they are simple for a program to recognize so we have developed the milw.* CleanupBot. The use of a program to make these decisions makes it more objective. 2) Articles which contain nothing specifically relevant to the Milwaukee Metro Area area or are inappropriate to the topic of the group are also in violation of the local-use implication of each of the milw.* newsgroups' charters. For articles in this category, the administrators send e-mail explaining the local-use policy and asking them not to post out-of-the-area or off-topic materials in the milw.* newsgroups. These messages also include warnings that if the activity continues, the CleanupBot is available to enforce it. (See the "repeat offender" policy below.) - Forms of Net Abuse This section presents and defines of the kinds of net abuse which are being actively opposed by the milw.* newsgroup community. All the forms of net abuse listed here deal with posted Usenet articles. If you're looking for ideas on how to oppose an e-mail spam you may have received, try http://spam.abuse.net on the Web. In all cases of abuse, first contact the originator, then their site administrators, before resorting to posting negative public statements about them. (Never e-mail-bomb a net abuser - that's net abuse itself.) Some are posting on Usenet or using the Internet for the first time and usually have not been given any instructions about netiquette from their Internet provider. A polite, firm, and well-written response is often sufficient to educate them not to "spam the Net" again. o Out-of-the-area Soliciation (OOTAS) This is only a concern in local-area newsgroups so the news.admin.net-abuse followers don't have a common derogatory term (such as "spam" or "velveeta") for it. But in local newsgroup hierarchies, this is the main issue. Solicitations from outside the area are usually part of the commission of an EMP (spam) or ECP (velveeta). Generally, the people who do this are motivated by all the "forsale" or "market" newsgroups they see when they get new Internet access. They usually either don't know that it's wrong or greed makes them pursue it anyway. The effect when lots of people do this is to make it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain local discussions and keep the readers subscribed to the newsgroups. Most new users don't have the experience to know the prime question behind all of Usenet netiquette, "If everyone did what I'm thinking of doing, would Usenet be a better place?" The answer is pretty obvious, since we just narrowly avoided letting this situation get far enough to kill off the local discussion in the milw.* newsgroups. No, it would not make Usenet a better place. The relatively few people who do out-of-the-area solicitations are having a profoundly negative impact on the Net. Implementation in milw.* policy: Unless another reason (such as ECP, EMP, or repeat offender) makes it cancellable, first-time commisions of OOTAS are responded to by e-mail. This e-mail constitutes a warning and should also include some instruction about netiquette. A second offense after a warning invokes the "repeat offender" policy. By definition, OOTAS policy does not apply to residents of the Milwaukee Metro Area. Since the Milwaukee Metro Area is a significant part of the economy of Wisconsin, the administrators give the benefit of the doubt to residents of the surrounding region. However, e-mails discouraging distant advertising may still be sent to them. o Excessive Multiple-Posting (EMP) EMP is known on the net by the derogatory term "spam". Posting an article more than once is abusive and wasteful of resources. This is considered spam. If you post the same or similar article 20 times or in 20 different newsgroups, your spam is bad enough that somebody will almost certainly cancel it for you. People literally all over the world (from Australia and Korea to Finland, with lots in North America too) will cancel your articles with the full support of most of the Net. Other numerical combinations can reach the same result. Spam is not based on the content of the article but, rather, just on the numbers of copies of the article posted and to how many newsgroups. See the newsgroups news.admin.net-abuse.announce and news.admin.net-abuse.misc for more information about the "Breidbart Index" (BI) used to compute the threshold for violating this criteria. If the BI exceeds 20, your articles are cancellable on sight. Implementation in milw.* policy: Spam is not generally determined as such by the administrators. The wide multiple-posting is outside the scope of this policy to catch on a first offense, though other people around the world do take an interest in it. Usually the response for a first-time OOTAS takes care of this type of article when posted in an milw.* newsgroup and the repeat offender policy takes over after a second one. o Excessive Cross-Posting (ECP) ECP is known on the net by the derogatory term "velveeta". If you post a single article to lots of different newsgroups, then you are committing "velveeta". The limits vary because often these are also posted to local-area newsgroups, which are allowed to set their own limits for acceptable use. Some local area hierarchy coordinators respond to this by just simply cancelling the article including, of course, on all the newsgroups it was cross-posted to since you can't separate them. When the milw.* CleanupBot cancels an article because it is programmaticaly identified as excessively cross-posted, it sends an e-mail to the poster if a reply address was provided. (Of course, some people know they're doing something wrong and make it impossible to reply, in which case no attempt is made.) Also, the cancel control message from the CleanupBot includes a list of reasons for the cancellation. Implementation in milw.* policy: Velveeta is automatically recognized and cancelled by the milw.* CleanupBot. According to this policy, the program's configuration is maintained to correspond to the levels permissible for auto-cancellation. It operates unattended but reports all activity to an administrative mail list. Members of the milw.* community may request to be added to the mail list if they wish to audit its activity or monitor its performance. o Re-posting old articles Significant numbers of re-posted old articles are known on the Net by the derogatory term "spew". This usually only happens in the case of a malfunction or operator error, such as restoring a backup of a news spool disk (you should never back up NetNews articles, for this reason) or a gateway between Usenet and a non-RFC1036 news system fails to stop articles originating from Usenet from being sent back out as if they were new messages. Spew is a pure waste of network bandwidth. For that reason, it is generally agreed to be cancellable on sight. Please also make an effort to politely but quickly alert the originating site of the problem - that's the only way to prevent more from being sent out. Implementation in milw.* policy: Spew in an milw.* newsgroup may be cancelled on sight by any member of the milw.* community. Cancel controls must state a reason and provide a non-anonymous address to contact the poster of the cancel. It is also recommended to send e-mail to the poster and/or their site's news admins. When recognized, the system which is the source of the spew will be added to the milw.* CleanupBot's auto-cancel list as long as spew articles continue to arrive. The site will be removed from the list when it is confirmed repaired and spew articles have clearly stopped. o Binaries in non-binary newsgroups Binary articles such as pictures, sound and animations are usually very large. They take time to transmit on the modems which people use to exchange news. Some sites deliberately do not include binary newsgroups in their newsfeed because the transmission time costs them money. This, more so than most other wastes of network bandwidth, is a serious economic issue for people who have news feeds at home or at small commercial or non-profit sites. So, if you post a binary in a non-binary newsgroup, it's cancellable on sight. Implementation in milw.* policy: There are no binary newsgroups in the milw.* hierarchy. There is a zero-tolerance policy for binaries, with the exception of PGP digitally signed clear text messages. Binaries in an milw.* newsgroup may be cancelled on sight by any member of the milw.* community. Cancel controls must state a reason and provide a non-anonymous address to contact the poster of the cancel. It is also recommended to send e-mail to the poster and/or their site's news admins. The CleanupBot also automatically cancels some binaries. For cases that aren't obvious enough to trigger the CleanupBot, posters are immediately added to the auto-cancel list and all prior instances of their binaries are re-run though the CleanupBot. The posters may remove themselves from the auto-cancel list in the same procedure as the "repeat offender" policy. Binaries result in an milw.* UDP on a first offense so, if you cancel one, please e-mail the headers to the milw.* newsgroups coordinators at cleanup@usenet.mil.wi.us so the CleanupBot can be configured to auto-cancel the poster. o Well-known Scam: Make Money Fast (MMF) If you post a message with a title, "Make Money Fast", it won't live very long and your mailbox will be filled with hateful flame mail from the people who did see it before it was cancelled. If this sounds surprising to you, keep reading... In 1985 someone wrote a pyramid scam in a chain letter and posted it on Usenet. (Both pyramid scams and chain letters are illegal in the USA and most countries around the world.) Over the course of more than a decade, people have been trying to stomp it out. Unfortunately, every time someone posts it, it seems like someone else sees it before the cancels go out. And the cycle starts over as they follow the instructions to post it to ten more newsgroups. Today, as Usenet articles are available via CD-ROM and some sites do not honor cancel messages, the "MMF" scam is still available for unwary new users to follow. Besides being stupid, chain letters are illegal. The United States Postal Service's Postal Inspector has more information online at "http://www.usps.gov/websites/depart/inspect/chainlet.htm". The milw.* CleanupBot is one of hundreds of automated programs around the world that will cancel an MMF at the moment it arrives on the system, and propagate the cancel instructions rapidly to other news sites. Implementation in milw.* policy: There is a zero-tolerance policy for MMF. MMF in an milw.* newsgroup may be cancelled on sight by any member of the milw.* community. Cancel controls must state a reason and provide a non-anonymous address to contact the poster of the cancel. It is also recommended to send e-mail to the poster and/or their site's news admins. The CleanupBot also automatically cancels anything with the subject "Make Money Fast". Upper or lower case does not matter. Due to the need for rapid response, there are no exceptions for other articles with that subject even if they're not the MMF scam. MMF results in an milw.* UDP on a first offense so, if you cancel one, please e-mail the headers to the milw.* newsgroups coordinators at cleanup@usenet.mil.wi.us so the CleanupBot can be configured to auto-cancel the poster. - Crossposting Limits This section is not yet completed. As an interim guideline, no post should be crossposted to more than two other local regional hierarchies (wi, uwm, mu, execpc, etc). No post should be crossposted to more than four other newsgroups. No post should be crossposted to a non-local regional hierarchy (ba, etc). Due to deliberate and malicious attacks, crossposts resulting from any article that includes a milw.* hierarchy newsgroup in the Followups-To: header but not in the Newsgroups: header may be cancelled by the Milwaukee CleanupBot. The first post from any sender will be returned to the sender via e-mail by the Milwaukee CleanupBot, with a short note of explanation. Subsequent posts may be mailed as well, however, the CleanupBot reserves the right to omit further responses due to the possibility of mailbombings, etc. - Who May Cancel Articles? This summarizes who is allowed by the milw.* policies to issue cancels, since some of the types of abuse listed above are handled by the milw.* newsgroup coordinators and other are subject to zero-tolerance policies and cancellable by any resident of the Milwaukee Metro Area who has the experience to do so. Remember: These only apply to messages which are posted or cross-posted in the milw.* newsgroups. These policies are void for articles not appearing in any milw.* newsgroup. Consult the applicable newsgroup charters and the Net Abuse FAQ before cancelling articles in any newsgroup. OOTAS cancels are handled by the milw.* newsgroup coordinators to avoid a mob situation. EMP and ECP cancels are handled by the milw.* newsgroup coordinators. Usenet-wide spam cancellers are also authorized to issue spam cancels for the milw.* newsgroups. Repeat offender cancels and milw UDPs are handled by the milw.* newsgroup coordinators. Spew cancels may be done by any sufficiently-experienced member of the Milwaukee community. MMF and binary cancels may be done by any sufficiently-experienced member of the Milwaukee community. If you cancel one of these, please e-mail a copy of the article headers to the milw.* coordinators at cleanup@usenet.mil.wi.us because MMF and binaries carry UDP penalties. Cancellation requests from members of the community to the milw.* newsgroup coordinators should be directed to cleanup@usenet.mil.wi.us. Cancels issued by members of the community must state a reason and provide a non-anonymous address to contact the poster of the cancel. It is also recommended to send e-mail to the poster and/or their site's news admins. - Repeat Offender Policy A "repeat offender" is a person or site that violates this policy or the charter of a milw.* newsgroup after an explicit request has been made to comply with the policy and charter. Such requests may be made by any resident of the Milwaukee Metro Area, and should be sent via e-mail to the offender and/or the offender's ISP, as needed. A courtesy copy to is requested. The request should include a copy of the group's charter, and a brief explanation of why the post is in violation. Repeat offenders are subject to a personal UDP, enforced by the milw.* CleanupBot, as outlined below. A repeat offender may request a second chance by sending an e-mail to with an apology and agreeing to comply with the wishes of the community, as described in these newsgroup hierarchy policies. If the apology and agreement are convincing, the user will be removed from the CleanupBot's personal UDP list. A Usenet site may be subject to a site UDP, enforced by the milw.* CleanupBot. A site typically becomes subject to such an action when there is a series of offenses by a user, and fails (or refuses) to prevent its users from breaking this policy or a milw.* charter. The administrator of such a site may request a second chance in the same manner as a repeat offender. - The milw.* CleanupBot The milw.* CleanupBot is an automated "cancelbot" and was developed at the requests of many milw.* readers. It operates under the authority of the milw.* newsgroup hierarchy coordinators. It is an effort to enforce the local-use policy which has been blatantly abused by people outside the area. All regional newsgroup hierarchies are experiencing this problem and many are taking varying measures to curb the problem. However, the CleanupBot will not touch messages which are not posted to milw.* newsgroups. So people who insist on spamming the *.forsale newsgroups are still able to do so without interference from the milw CleanupBot if they omit all milw.* newsgroups from their articles. (Of course, spammers are net abusers by definition so they can expect resistance from other sources too.) These are the current types of automatically-cancellable articles. o Any article posted to a milw.* group and more than four additional groups (regardless of whether or not the group is a milw.* group). o Any article posted to a milw.* group and at least one non-local regional group. This is determined by comparing to a list of known local regional hierarchies and the traditional Big8 plus alt. o Any article posted to a milw.* group and to more than two other local regional hierarchies. o Any article posted to a milw.* group by a "repeat offender". o Any article posted to a milw.* group by a nonresponsive site hosting a "repeat offender". o The CleanupBot is not currently removing HTML or binary posts. However, these are against policies, and the CleanupBot will be modified to handle these types of abuse in the future. - This Document This document may be modified as necessary to clarify any points that are discovered to be unclear.