The guidelines are simple and mostly commonsense -- but strictly
enforced.  Full details are in the next section.

You either may email your submission to <austin-announce -at-
frenzy.austin.tx.us> or just post it to the group (your news software
will route the submission to the moderator for review).  If your
submission meets the guidelines, it will be posted by the moderator --
usually within the day.

Messages that do not meet the guidelines will be returned, unposted.
The return notice will indicate why the submission was not accepted.
Often a returned message would have been accepted except for a minor
problem.  In this case, we strongly encourage you to revise and
resubmit your announcement.  Blatant spam will be neither returned nor
posted.  The same goes for emails in HTML format.

The moderator reserves the right to silently toss submissions that are
mere blatant commercial ads from outside of Austin and have nothing
whatsoever to do with Austin.  Do be aware that the moderator finds
himself exercising this roughly 300 times per day (as of 07/2004), so
if your message even looks like spam it probably will be overlooked.
Having a good Subject: header goes a long ways towards keeping this
from happening.

Let me say that again ... spammers try to post to austin.announce
approximately 300 times a day, so I'm looking at a lot of spam, and if
your post looks like spam, I will almost certainly overlook it, and
therefore it won't get posted and I won't email you and tell you that.
Putting AUSTIN: in the Subject header like this --

   Subject: AUSTIN: Eeyore's birthday party!

will help ensure that I see it (I'll edit out the AUSTIN when I post
it) and don't overlook it.  If you skip this part, the odds are very
good that I will not see your posting.  You have been warned.

The two most common reason for (non blatant spam) rejections are: 1)
the message is not an announcement of widespread interest, or 2)
violation of the no cross-/re-posting rule.