Usenet II

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The Usenet II is a 1998 lanciertes alternative network to Usenet , whose technology is largely based. Some changes to the design are intended to correct defects in the Usenet, including spamming , excessive cross-posting (the distribution of an article in many groups), flames, the distribution of messages that are not formatted according to the current technical standard, and a few others.

design

Usenet II is technically designed so that it can be used by existing news servers and newsreaders without major changes. In order to avoid naming conflicts with the existing news hierarchies in Usenet, all newsgroups of Usenet II have the prefix "net.", Basically Usenet II is nothing more than a sub-hierarchy of the existing Usenet.

The core of Usenet II is a very strict set of rules based on the so-called Soundness Doctrine ( sound : correct , flawless ). Every news server that participates in Usenet II must adhere to the Soundness Doctrine and should only receive messages from servers that adhere to it, since it also risks being excluded from Usenet II.

The central concern of the "Soundness Doctrine" is that the administrators of a server participating in Usenet II must ensure that all messages sent via their server adhere to precisely defined technical specifications. These include, among other things, that the message is fully compliant with RFC 1036 and also contains a valid email address as the sender that belongs to the author, a line NNTP posting host , with which the sender's host can be clearly identified, and a Header Distribution , which must contain the value 4gh . In addition, a message that begins with Re: in the subject must contain at least one predecessor in the References header and may be cross-posted in a maximum of three groups; Crossposts in groups outside of Usenet II are prohibited, as are so-called binaries (messages that do not consist exclusively of text). Postings that do not conform to these guidelines will be deleted.

News servers whose administrators do not ensure that their users write postings that conform to the guidelines can be excluded from Usenet II.

administration

Usenet II is administered by a Usenet II Steering Committee . This uses hierarchy czars, who are responsible for all administrative matters within a sub-hierarchy, namely the appointment of moderators for moderated newsgroups, the existence of newsgroups and the issuing of additional rules.

The Steering Committee can be voted out with a three-quarters majority of the hierarchy tsars. In addition, a news server with a three-quarters majority of the news server operators participating in Usenet II can be excluded.

criticism

The design of the Usenet II is criticized mainly because of the very strict rules, but also because of the lack of democratic mechanisms. Another objection is that the rules give individual people (the hierarchy tsars) too much power. Proponents of the system object that the participation of all users in decision-making processes would make decision-making unduly difficult. In any case, it can be observed that web forums, which, like Usenet II, are also an alternative to Usenet and serve a similar market, usually also have poorly developed democratic mechanisms, whereby the administrators in web forums generally have much more extensive intervention options than the Usenet II committees.

The introduction of cancelbots and server and client-side filters in the old Usenet, as well as the fact that spammers have now found more lucrative places than Usenet, have led to one of the main reasons for the introduction of Usenet II, namely the containment of the spam problem, has been dropped.

Current situation

Usenet II has not caught on and is not even run on most servers. Most Usenet users either stayed on Usenet or switched to alternative media (e.g. mailing lists or web forums), in which the rules specified by a committee (usually the administrators) can be enforced more strictly.

However, the rules of Usenet II have had a decisive influence on the current rules of some small hierarchies.

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