Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!geneva.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: NO MORE FOR SALE ADDS !!!!!! Message-ID: Date: 26 Oct 88 03:15:06 GMT References: <1734@bu-tyng.bu.edu> <16800384@clio> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 29 Mike Berger asks what is wrong with ads in technical groups. There are several problems with ads. The most basic one is that there are a number of ways in which using Usenet for personal gain can cause both legal and other troubles. What is personal gain is of course a difficult issue, since plenty of people ask advice and ask for help, and these can be construed as personal gain. On the other hand, that is all technical material, and can benefit us all. Most administrators would draw the line at advertisements. They cause political problems within Usenet, because they lead to the impression that the PC groups aren't used for anything "serious", but are primarily for peoples' hobbies. This could get them moved to distributions that are less widespread. Some organizations have policies against using their computer facilities for anything other than business. Again, it's not clear exactly what is business. One can argue that technical information about PC's is. It is hard to make that argument about ads. Finally, many sites still get these groups via some piece of the DDN (e.g. Arpanet or Milnet), and those media have a very explicit ban on advertising or other things that might be interpreted as personal gain. For all of these reasons, anything that looks like an ad is prohibited from the technical groups. For sites that do not have these policy and/or legal problems, there are separate groups. Personal ads go in misc.forsale and misc.wanted. There are often local distributions which make more sense, e.g. in our area nj.wanted, and within Rutgers people often use our local ru.general. Product announcements go in the biz groups. By separating this material, sites that can't deal with it can still carry the technical information.