Newsgroup Charter

Does anyone know where I can find a copy. If a specific charter was not
written for rec.boats, is their a charter that covers all newsgroups in the
rec. hierarchy?

--

Jim
---

There is a charter for rec.boats.cruising - it has been posted to that
newsgroup recently - should be available via deja or remarq, if it is
not available on your server.

--
Peter Bennett VE7CEI
GPS and NMEA info and programs: http://vancouver-webpages.com/peter/index.html
Newsgroup new user info: http://vancouver-webpages.com/nnq

Graham Drabble

This comes up periodically. If I am not mistaken, rec.boats was
created as part of a general "setup" of second level newsgroups.
As such it never went through the (lengthy) process that includes
writing a charter or declaration of purpose. As far as anyone knows,
including some people who have been involved with rec.boats for far
longer than I have, there never has been a charter for rec.boats.

As for a general charter for all the "setup" newsgroups, I believe
that you have to have a look at all the sources of newsgroup info,
including Peter Bennett's at: http://vancouver-webpages.com/nnq
and distill your own charter for newsgroups in general.

Some basics include:
1. Be polite
2. ASCII only (no binaries, except in groups so designated)
3. No solicitations for business (except in groups so designated)
4. Stay on or close to the topic
5. Keep crossposting to a minimum and if you must, set a Reply-To

An easy test for newsgroup behavior is the same as for the
"tragedy of the commons" dilemma: ask yourself "What if
everybody did it?" We share limited resources: bandwidth,
and the available time and patience of the participants. If
these are abused, the newsgroups become less and less useful.

--
--Pete
pwm...@mail.msen.com (Peter W. Meek)
http://www.msen.com/~pwmeek/

It probably doesn't exist. All an unmoderated group needs to exist is
a name. If the name describes the topic of a newsgroup, there isn't a
need for formal elaboration. Perhaps, over time certain an
understanding will be developed by the participants about what is
discussed and what isn't discussed in a newsgroup. This understanding
of what a group is for could be considered to be its charter. It's
hard to make a copy of an understanding.

After a while, it was decided that a more formal description of new
groups was desirable. One reason was to help determine if the name
for the group was descriptive of its topics, and another was to have
something to stick in the body of a newgroup control message. A news
admin could read the description and decide whether to carry the new
group on their system. As time has passed charters have become even
more elaborate, sometimes describing certain types of posts as being
improper.

<ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/news.announce.newgroups> is an archive
of the articles posted to news.announce.newgroups since the latter
part of 1991, with some backfill before that from individual private
records. This includes the RFD's, CFV's, and RESULT's postings for
new groups created since that time, which include a copy of the
initial "charter" of those groups.

rec.boats and rec.boats.paddle pre-date that archive. By reading the
proposals for groups that have split off since that time, one may
infer certain things about the charters of the earlier groups.

No. In the Big 8 (rec.* is one of the 8), only groups have charters.