From Newsgroup: news.misc

So, it's happened; I've just posted announcements to the groups:

news:MiwxWyH5ZFN0fETl@violet.siamics.net - news:comp.simulation news:Z2aco2S-VXQsZPJA@violet.siamics.net - news:comp.newprod news:hbGlrJJ2rO1pTgS4@violet.siamics.net - news:rec.photo.moderated

(Still have some research to do for the news:comp.std.announce
announcement.)

I'm posting this here in comp.misc for several reasons:

* I believe that among the readers here might be those interested
in joining these groups, or those who know those who might be;

* I'm curious what issues with my "common submission guidelines"
below an open discussion might reveal;

* I'd rather not post said guidelines to each of the groups
individually.

I'm also cross-posting to news.misc because it seems more
fitting, though it doesn't seem to have been active recently.
Feel free to respond there (disregarding Followup-To:) instead
if you like; if anything, I'll be monitoring both groups for
this discussion.

The guidelines below apply to comp.newprod, comp.simulation,
comp.std.announce and rec.photo.moderated; and reflect both
what I consider to be "good Usenet behavior," and how the
things are currently set up on my side.


Usenet is a public forum and as such, articles submitted
to newsgroups are expected to be of interest to readers at
large, not aimed at a particular person. If you believe a
participant of the group might have an issue with something
that is not strictly under the topic of the group, please
communicate your considerations elsewhere, such as by email.

The use of your "real" name in From: is not strictly required,
but a /consistent/ identity is still expected. "Example Inc.
Sales Department" might be suitable for comp.newprod
submissions; and your Wikimedia Commons account name, for your
rec.photo.moderated ones.

It is recommended that an *.invalid domain email address is
used in From:, both to thwart email address harvesters /and/
to avoid your submission being rejected due to SPF mismatch.
That said, there should be a valid email address, and one
you're entitled to use, /somewhere/ in the message (say,
Reply-To: or the signature.) Mangling is allowed, so long as
the mail domain ends with .invalid /and/ it is obvious to me
how to get the original address from there. Postings that
lack a valid email address might be approved, but if they're
rejected, you won't know why.

It's possible to submit articles directly over email (see
below.) In such a case, please use an appropriate valid
address in the envelope (MAIL FROM:.)

Submissions should not exceed 128 KiB in size (header + body.)
While my MTA /will/ accept somewhat larger ones to account for
transit overhead (Received: and such), one should not rely on that.

As an aside, note that Usenet archives might truncate long
articles. For example, http://al.howardknight.net/ IME only
stores up to 200 lines of the body.

By the same merit, if you forward an article from elsewhere
(say, from a blog), be sure to include the original URI near
the /top/ of your post: that way, even if the article gets
truncated, someone reading it from archives will still be
pointed to the full orignal instance. It's also nice as it
allows the reader to stop reading the article early if they
do not find the original site to their taste.

Avoid using non-ASCII characters in the headers: while some
newsreaders do support RFC 2047, others do not.

Submission bodies should be "plain" plain text (MIME type
"text/plain", no format=flowed, etc.), either ASCII (with or
without MIME headers), or 8-bit UTF-8 (MIME headers required.)
If your submission has other parts (say, text/html), I'll
remove them, unless it's obvious to me that they are important
to the message as a whole, in which case I'll reject and ask
to resubmit. In exceptional cases, I might edit your submission
to fit if it doesn't already.


It's possible to submit articles by email, such as explained
in http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderated_newsgroups
#How_can_I_bypass_my_News_Service_Provider? (URI split for
readability.)

To use this option, first make sure your message has a proper
Newsgroups: header. (At some point I'm going to configure my Exim
instance to reject emails to the submission addresses lacking one.)

Messages submitted this way should have a valid email address
in the envelope (MAIL FROM:), must not fail SPF verification,
and preferrably should also have a valid DKIM signature. Note
that it's generally still possible (and advisable) to have an
*.invalid address in the From: header.

On a Unix-like system with appropriately configured mail delivery,
the following example /usr/sbin/sendmail invocation can be used
as a starting point (tested on Debian GNU/Linux "Bookworm", but
if I'm reading sendmail(1) correctly, it should work on NetBSD
just as well; refer to the individual announcements for the
actual submission addresses):

$ cat < newspost
From: Alice <alice@nowhere.invalid>
Reply-To: Alice <alice@example.net>
Newsgroups: example.newsgroup.moderated
Message-Id: <d_QiVQf-IZLLKJxlbxJPoPpVc6BkE5CY@example.invalid>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:45:08 +0000
Subject: test

This is a test message.
$ /usr/sbin/sendmail \
-i -f alice@example.net \
example-newsgroup-moderated-submit@example.com \
< newspost
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2