Newsgroups
New users

"OK, I'm relatively new to the internet and especially to this newsgroups stuff. Is there some interesting information out there that might get me up to speed on all this quicker?"

Well, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) probably has some relevant info on its website and in its local newsgroups and then there's the special newsgroup for new users to read: news.announce.newusers ('announce' meaning that it's a moderated newsgroup only for reading, not for posting in this case). Any good little newsreader _should_ auto-subscribe you to this newsgroup when you start it for the first time. If that newsgroup isn't loaded with Frequently Asked Question etc. documents at the moment, then those are also archived at ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.announce.newusers/

Post sizes

If you are going to post bigger files, like big, high quality JPG files, please set the 'part size' in your news posting program to somewhere in the 5000-8000 lines range. (225-360 K raw, 310-500 K encoded) A small number of newsservers won't accept files >0.5 MB (8000 lines), while >1 MB (15000 lines) results in a lot of newsservers discarding your article. This means those articles won't be visible on those newsservers and newsservers 'downstream' of those newsservers, which vastly reduces the propagation of the pictures you post... Setting the part size too small (like 900 lines, which was the default in an old Forte Agent version) will result in a lot of parts and a higher chance of at least one of them going missing.

Labeling of posts

To make it easier for people to know what they are going to download before they download it, it's a good idea to clearly mark the name of the series and other relevant info in the Subject: line. Standardizing this also greatly helps those people using kill/select files to exactly select what they do and don't want to see. [name_of_anime] (for ex. [RANMA], [GitS], [LAIN]) is a good way of doing this. In time, a list of _advised_ Subject: line tags will be posted as a companion to the FAQ.

File formats:

Some common and less common file formats found in this newsgroup: