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Charter of uk.announce

(Moderated)

uk.announce is a moderated group for announcing news or events of specific interest to the uk readership. It provides a means of posting announcements to a wider uk audience than the readership of the newsgroups in which their subjects would naturally place them. Announcements targeting a global audience are inappropriate. Any post that is not announcing something is unacceptable.

Follow-ups within the group are only acceptable when from the original poster repairing a factual error. Follow-ups will be set as a default by the moderators to poster, however, Follow-ups to an appropriate group will be accepted with the moderators having the power to deem what is appropriate.

Announcements must not depend heavily on specialist knowledge or external sources of information in order for it to be clearly understood what is being announced. Simply posting a URL pointing to the actual announcement is unacceptable.

Subject to the above constraint announcements should be as concise as is comfortably possible, giving additional details by URL if necessary. There is limit of 60 lines but few announcements should exceed 30 lines. A line is defined as being 72 characters long.

Subject lines must give an accurate impression (in English) of what is to be found in the body of the announcement. Their intent must be to maximise the reader's ability to determine relevance and hence should avoid terms that will be unfamiliar to most readers. The use in subject lines of superlatives, unusual punctuation, ALL CAPS, or enigmatic or misleading wording to draw attention is unacceptable.

Announcements from individuals seeking to locate long-lost individuals are inappropriate. Geneological announcement seeking to locate family roots are inappropriate.

Reviews and testimonials in themselves are inappropriate as these are the poster's opinion, not information. An announcement may, however, quote reviews of the entity being announced.

Posts announcing substantially the same thing as has been announced in the preceding 3 months are unacceptable.

Binaries

Posts must be in plain un-encoded text (excepting cryptographic signatures).

Advertising

No advertising will be permitted except of events - uk.adverts.* exists for this purpose.

Crossposting

Crossposts between uk.announce and other moderated newsgroups will not be approved by the uk.announce moderators, however <control@usenet.org.uk> may do so for administrative posts.

Other relevant crossposting is acceptable provided sensible thought is given to the "Followup-to" header. However, crossposting to newsgroups not accessible to the moderator may be technically infeasible.

Posting something to uk.announce and also separately to each of several unmoderated groups (Spamming) is totally unacceptable even if it falls below the usual Spam cancellation threshold. A limit of two groups as well as uk.announce is set for cross-posting.

Moderation Procedure

Posting to the moderated newsgroups in the usual way will result in the post being emailed to the submission address <uk-announce@usenet.org.uk>. Mail for the attention of the moderation team should be addressed to <uk-announce-request@usenet.org.uk> and *not* the submission address.

Moderation shall be done by suitable software such as STUMP or its equivalent. This software will enable moderation by a team via the WWW. The group will use the facilities of moderation.org.uk to perform this.

Moderators are not obliged to accept messages that require modification. However, moderation may alter header lines as appropriate, clean up the formatting of text, strip attachments, strip signatures added by transport services, prepend clearly identified comments in square brackets and append a signature. No other changes are allowed.

Notifications of rejection shall be mailed, this notification shall include the charter of uk.announce for the first rejection to an email address and a simple rejection on further rejections to an email address.

Rejections will not be sent to persistent spammers and those with clearly invalid return-addresses.

Moderators

There shall be a team of moderators between 2 and 6 in number.

The current moderators may appoint their own successors and may remove any active moderator at their discretion. In extreme circumstances, such as when there are no active moderators, the UK Usenet Committee may appoint a new team of moderators.

The current moderators are:

Iain Bowen <iain.bowen(at)gmail.com>
Pedt Scragg <moderator(at)mx2.org.uk>

Newsgroups line

uk.announce		General announcements of UK interest (Moderated)

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