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From: kalmoth@rt66.com (Peter Vorobieff)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.russian,soc.answers,news.answers
Subject: [soc.culture.russian] SCR and Cyrillization FAQ: part 1/4 (charter and posting guidelines)
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This part of SOC.CULTURE.RUSSIAN FAQ answers the questions:

1.1
   - What is S.C.R.?
   - What is the language of S.C.R.?
   - What should and should not be posted to S.C.R.?
   - What other newsgroups with related topics exist?
   - Is the Charter in this FAQ official?
   - Is this FAQ official?
1.2
   - What to post and NOT to post?
   - How to react to net abuse?
   - Why hate speech articles cannot be eliminated?
   - How to react to hate speech?
   - How to react to an article you LIKED?
   - What is a killfile and how to use it?
   - Whom to killfile?
   - What is the crossposting strategy?

1.1 SOC.CULTURE.RUSSIAN CHARTER

Newsgroups line:
soc.culture.russian             All things Russian in the broadest sense.

CHARTER

SOC.CULTURE.RUSSIAN is an unmoderated newsgroup for free exchange of
information, ideas and opinions on Russian culture, language, history,
economy, science and all other topics related to Russia in the
geographical, national, political and cultural sense of the word.

Posts of five types listed immediately below bear NO relevance to the
topics of soc.culture.russian:

    1. Discussion of the alleged massacre of Turks by Armenians in the
       beginning of the twentieth century.
    2. Claims that Nazi crimes in 1933-1945 never happened.
    3. All national hatemongering (represented by the typical
       cliche "All [...] are [cowards|idiots|traitors|...]).
    4. Unwanted and unsolicited commercial advertisements.
    5. Massive crossposts hitting more than ten newsgroups.

The topics pertaining primarily to the study of Russian as a foreign
language and to international contacts between children studying Russian
at school should belong in k12.lang.russian rather than in
soc.culture.russian.

The topics pertaining primarily to the heritage of problems left by
the Soviet Union and its dissolution should belong in
soc.culture.soviet rather than in soc.culture.russian.

Likewise, the current political affairs between the former republics
of the Soviet Union should be discussed in alt.current-events.russia
and in talk.politics.soviet rather than in soc.culture.russian.

The primary languages in the newsgroup are English and Russian (in
Latin transliteration and in KOI-8 [RFC-1489] Cyrillic).

END CHARTER

The Charter as reproduced above is the official Charter of
soc.culture.russian. Its text was accepted by the same vote that
created the newsgroup. There were politically motivated attempts to
distribute a fake charter. The real thing, however, is stored at this
site (and in a couple of other places), as one can verify by checking
the official UUNET archives:

URL:
ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/soc/soc.culture.russian

The charter, the voting results and all the RFDs and CFVs are stored
there. As to FAQs, there is no such thing as an "official FAQ" in an
unmoderated newsgroup. Anybody can write one.

1.2 SOC.CULTURE.RUSSIAN POSTING SUGGESTIONS

The material below expresses the personal opinion of Peter Vorobieff on
the matter, and is in no way binding, but be advised that if you don't
follow the guidelines below, chances are that the greater part of the
readers of soc.culture.russian will hate your guts.

The newsgroup is unmoderated, which means that anything not grossly
off-topic or beyond the written and unwritten laws of the net goes.
Usenet is so diverse that it would be difficult to provide any
guidelines for "acceptable behavior." It's easy to describe what
is _unacceptable_, as there are but a few things clearly off-limits:
massive crossposts (as indicated in the Charter), spams (see
news.admin.net-abuse.misc FAQ for the definition of this term),
posts of pyramid schemes ("MAKE MONEY FAST" and the likes), forged
posts and binary dumps. Usenet does not take kindly to this kind of
abuse and protects itself from abusers.

If you see a "MAKE MONEY FAST" post, a post that has been posted to
many (twenty or more) newsgroups or a uuencoded post of the source code
of a cruise missile control program, the right way to react is either
to ignore the thing or to send a POLITE e-mail message to the
postmaster of the site from which the net abuse appears to propagate,
with a carbon copy to the perpetrator. The totally WRONG way to react
is to post an indignant follow-up to the thing without even bothering
to check to how many groups it will be dumped.

If you see an obviously forged article (for instance, something that
appears to be written by you but definitely wasn't), the task of
tracking down the perp may be hard. If the content of the article is
potentially damaging (say, it contains a request on your behalf for
weapon-grade uranium or a sexual proposal to Socks the Presidential
Cat), you must immediately contact your own postmaster and notify
him|her|it of the problem. You can cancel the forgery or, if you don't
know how, ask your postmaster to do it. Posting a request to help you
in finding the site from which the forgery had originated to
news.admin.net-abuse.misc can also be a reasonable idea. Some
amateurish forgeries can be traced by the NNTP-Posting-Host or Path
lines in the header easily enough. However, a good forgery is
practically untraceable.

Compared with spams and the like, ad hominem flames, nationalistic
rants and other irritating but local things are not immediately criminal
and normally should not require any police or vigilante action.

It must be stated that though national hatemongering is
explicitly prohibited on soc.culture.russian, very few entities
(it is not known whether they deserve to be called humans) do
routinely violate this prohibition and post demented hate-filled
rants.

As censoring even hate speech is a touchy issue, the best way to deal
with the hatemongers is to ignore them. If this sounds too saintly for
you, you always can write e-mail (not POST) to the sender of the
article you did not like and tell him|her|it that you did not like
his|her|its post.

This works MUCH more effectively than following-up to a rant
and keeps the noise level of the newsgroup lower.

On the other hand, if you LIKED somebody's article, it is also good to
send a short message of appreciation to the author via e-mail. Don't
post a followup if you have nothing of relevance to add.

It is wise to KILLFILE the posters whom you see to post nothing of
interest - it saves both your nerves and your time. KILLFILE feature
allows you to select the posters whom you don't like and let your
newsreader automatically filter their articles, so in your corner of
cyberspace these obnoxious halfwits just cease to exist. Not all the
newsreaders have the killfile feature. I suggest that you use one that
DOES have it.

Some of the characters who, in the opinion of the maintainer of this
FAQ, post a lot while contribute nothing are listed below.

   dfly@infinet.com
   Dragon@Darkstar.siberia.ru

  Serge Viznyuk (Dragon Fly) - The Only True Russian on Internet.
  Enough said.

   dlv@bwalk.dm.com
   simvlad@bwalk.dm.com

  Dimitri Vulis, a.k.a. "Dr. Dimitri Vulis." At the moment, the only
  purpose of his net.existence seems to post ad hominem insults
  addressed at various net.personae or to disrupt votes for creation
  of new newsgroups.

  Some information on Vulis can be found at the URL

URL: 
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/net-legends-faq/part3/faq.h
tml
  (net.kooks FAQ)

  An interesting parody by David Sewell is at the URL

URL: http://packrat.aml.arizona.edu/~dsew/Netwriting/no-exit.html

  Finally, Matt Legare's Kook of the Month page now also has
  some stuff on Vulis:

URL: http://www.wetware.com/mlegare/kotm/winnersk96.html#may96

Crossposting between related but distinct newsgroups (for
soc.culture.russian this usually means crossposts from/to
soc.culture.soviet or soc.culture.russian.moderated) now constitutes
the greater part of the traffic of soc.culture.russian. Excessive
crossposting (in particular, crossposting of flamefests) lowers the
discussion level in the group, so refer to the charter to see where
your post belongs and keep crossposting to absolute minimum.

In general, do unto your neighbor what your neighbor wants to do
unto you, and do it fast - you may not have the chance to reload.

Or, put simpler, UZI does it.

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There is no me but me, and pv02@lehigh.edu and kalmoth@rt66.com are
my only true addresses. All my articles are PGP-signed. My PGP public
key is at URL: http://www.lehigh.edu/~pv02/pgpkey.txt