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Advertising On Usenet - How Not To Advertise On UsenetAdvertising On Usenet - How Not To Advertise On Usenet
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Subjects > Computers > Internet > Internet Culture Discussion > Advertising On Usenet
Useful advice for new users, system administrators, entrepreneurs, and others who are concerned about proper netiquette.
How *not* to advertise on Usenet
Unfortunately, there are just about as many *inappropriate* ways to advertise on Usenet as there are appropriate ways.
1. Posting off-topic messages in unrelated newsgroups
Each message you post to Usenet, regardless of its content, should only be posted to related newsgroups.
For example, you run a rug company. You want to sell lots of rugs. So, you post an advertisement about your rugs in sci.physics. Not surprisingly, a lot of people send you email telling you what a jerk you are.
Why'd they do this, you ask? It's simple: sci.physics has nothing to do with selling rugs. Your ad was as off-topic as if someone had tried to get a discussion going there about the upcoming football season or started posting a lot of messages about their recent vacation.
Suppose you own that rug company, and you regularly read rec.crafts.textiles.weaving. Would you like it if someone started coming in and posting a lot of ads to the newsgroup about ginseng tablets, and then someone else came in and started trying to sell magazine subscriptions, and before you knew it, it became hard to find any actual discussion of weaving going on?
Try to look at it from the other person's point of view. If you'd resent someone posting an ad for *their* product to *your* favorite newsgroup, why would you post an ad for *your* product to thousands of other people's favorite newsgroups?
Remember the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
2. Spamming
Spamming is defined as posting identical or nearly-identical messages (not just ads, although ads are usually what spammers post) to a lot of newsgroups, one right after the other. Since it's really not that difficult to write a program that will post the same advertisement to dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of newsgroups, a lot of people have taken to doing this.
What's happened to people who've spammed?
They've lost their accounts, been mail-bombed (had thousands of pieces of junk email sent to them), had people call up and yell at them in the middle of the night, had people forward their mail (by this I mean paper mail, not email) to someplace strange, had people sign them up for thousands of unwanted magazine subscriptions, had people send them thousands of pages of condemnatory faxes, and so forth.
This is not a threat -- it's an observation. Any benefits spamming might have brought you will be more than counteracted by the intense public outcry against you in every newsgroup you posted your ad to.
Some members of the media have gotten the mistaken impression that spamming is hated because it's *advertising*. While it's true that Usenet users don't have much fondness for advertising, the real reason spamming is hated so much is because it's unbelievably *rude*.
If you don't regularly read a newsgroup, why would you post an ad to it? In so doing, you're basically saying that you don't care what the people in that newsgroup think or whether your ad might inconvenience them; you're out to benefit yourself. When you spam by posting the same advertisement to hundreds or thousands of newsgroups, you're saying that your personal profit is more important than the discussions of millions of people.
Would *you* like it if someone came by your house day after day and shoveled several thousand copies of an advertising circular through your windows?
Each copy of the ad takes up disk space on thousands of machines around the world -- and if you post the ad 1,000 times, that's millions of copies of your message that *you* are making other people pay to store copies of. When you spam, you're hogging hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of other people's storage space.
So please, don't do it. I've already explained that *one* copy of an off-topic ad is rude because it has nothing to do with the group it was posted to. Multiply that by a thousand times to get an idea of how rude it is to spam.
See also ftp://ftp.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/advertising/how-to/part1
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