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Archive-name: sports/rugby-union-faq/intro-rsru
Posting-frequency: every 30 days Last-modified: 15 December 2002 (changes marked **) See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge Introducing rec.sport.rugby.union 1.1 Charter Discussion on all aspects of Rugby Union worldwide. This includes the day to day happenings in the sport, discussion of results and transfers, rule amendments etc. 1.2 Should I subscribe to rec.sport.rugby.union? If you have an interest in Rugby Union worldwide, this is the group for you. If you're merely interested in Rugby League, you could try rec.sport.rugby.league. There is also a number of local newsgroups, for those interested in Rugby Union in a single country. Rec.sport.rugby.union is an unmoderated newsgroup. This means anyone can join the discussion without having to gain expressed permission. However, please restrict your articles to the subject of Rugby Union. 1.3 History Rec.sport.rugby.union (usually abbreviated to RSRU) was created along with rec.sport.rugby.league, thereby ending the existence of the general Rugby newsgroup rec.sport.rugby, which itself dated back to January 1991. This was done to end long running flamewars between fans of the two codes. The RFD for the two old groups to be split was eventually submitted by Paul McNally on 24 July 1995. The proposal to create rec.sport.rugby.union was approved by the great majority of voters (177 - 27), resulting in the control message to be posted on 19 September 1995. See ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/rec/ for the complete breakdown. 1.4 Posting conventions and netiquette 1.4.1 Do not post the score of a game in the subject of a posting. Many subscribers only get to see the games delayed and don't want to know the score before having seen the game themselves. If your posting contains a result, add the suffix [spoiler] or [result] in the subject. 1.4.2 If you are making a reply to one point in a long post, please delete those parts of the post that are not relevant to your comments. If you wish, you can replace the removed comments with </snip>. Virtually everybody using a dial-up connection pays more to receive large posts, so be considerate. If the subject changes as a result please re-edit the subject header. 1.4.3 Please keep your signature short (preferably 4 lines or less) and put a sig-separator (--) in the line above the sig itself, as this enables most newsreaders to automatically slice off the signature upon reply. 1.4.4 Please try to avoid starting flame wars, especially along the lines of "my team's better than your team", or "your team is boring". If you must make sweeping statements, please try to justify them. If you mean something in jest, please use a smiley ;-) In general, try not to be deliberately offensive to anyone and think about what you have said before you post. Please try to avoid topics that have been discussed over and over again. Some of them include 'NH rugby is 10 man and boring', 'RU is a better game than RL', 'SH rugby is all froth and no substance', 'The English press are arrogant', 'NH/SH refereeing', 'Creatine', 'Pacific Islanders in the All Blacks', 'Any S12/NPC side would beat any European side by at least 40 points' and worst of all 'Food poisoning accusations at the 1995 RWC Final'. 1.4.5 Please do not post entirely in capitals as this will annoy a large group of people whose eyesight you have hurt. Besides, writing in capitals is considered yelling, which has little or no place in a well-behaving newsgroup like RSRU. 1.4.6 Crossposting to other newsgroups is encouraged, but only when the topic of your posting overlaps. Therefore you should see the charters of the newsgroups you're posting into. Long flamewars between any two codes, whether it is towards Rugby League, American Football or Aussie Rules, are to be avoided. Please do not reply to any post sent to a large number of newsgroups. 1.4.7 Do not judge people by extension of an e-mail address. A .au suffix does not necessarily mean a person is Australian. A number of subscribers to rec.sport.rugby.union live in exile and aren't amused at all when wrongly being called Australian, Pom, Yank or whatever. Also, be aware that a .uk suffix means more than England alone. 1.4.8 If a thread you're starting up covers one specific area of Rugby, you might want to indicate this in the subject header by including a prefix tag, ie [S12] Round 5 results, [6Ns] Italy vs France preview. This flagging makes it easier to use kill- and watchfilters in one's news reader. 1.4.9 (aka Rule 23) The only way to avoid accusations of whinging is to say nothing beyond congratulating the other team. 1.4.10 (aka Official RSRU John Hill's Law) A poster automatically loses the argument should he resort to personal abuse, racism / fascism / nazism accusations or to criticising spelling or grammar. 1.5 How to post into rec.sport.rugby.union If you regularly use newsgroups on Usenet you should have no problems posting to the group. If you are unfamiliar with Usenet then please read the appropriate documentation for more information. The FAQ Consortium offers a series of Usenet Primers on http://www.faqs.org/usenet. If this does not make things clear, the group news.newusers.questions is frequented by experienced Usenet users who offer help and suggestions on netiquette. Its official homepage (http://vancouver-webpages.com/nnq) is an excellent starting place when you're new on Usenet. Rec.sport.rugby.union is a non-binaries newsgroup. Posting attachments, other than pgp-encrypted signatures, is not allowed and could lead to sanctions imposed upon the offender. If you want to share binaries, upload them to your website or post them into a binaries newsgroup like alt.binaries.pictures.sports, then post a pointer into RSRU. Make sure your newsreader is set not to post messages as html into the group, as this will annoy many subscribers not using Netscape or Outlook. Promoting anything related to Rugby Union is OK, but please be moderate in your posting frequency. There is no need at all to tell us about your Rugby tournament three times a week. Make sure you post your message only once (it might take some time for your message to appear on the news-server). Don't post test-messages into rec.sport.rugby.union and use misc.test instead. That group is "read" by several computers all over the world that will send you e-mail to confirm your post was successful. The nature of this newsgroup means that people are going to have strong opinions about various topics. Reaction to these opinions is the entire lifeblood of this newsgroup. However, postings that merely tell someone that he is a "@#%$er" are not postings that refer to Rugby Union and therefore inappropriate for rec.sport.rugby.union. In other words: if your posting is a flame about Rugby Union, fine, it belongs here. A flame about a person does not. And talking about flames: there are always going to be a few idiots in the newsgroup, abusing everybody and everything, refusing to have a decent discussion. This is not the place to give a personal list of RSRU-idiots, but the advise is: be the smarter of the two and just ignore or killfile the tosser instead of starting up a needless flamewar. The general rule in any newsgroup: self-censorship would be *APPRECIATED*. 1.6 Language No rule on the language to use on rec.sport.rugby.union has been set out in the group charter. However, there is some sort of convention that posting in any language should be allowed, because RSRU aims to be a forum for Rugby Union fans worldwide. Unfortunately, there are always going to be a few reactions to a non-English posting that one must speak English in an English group. It is hereby made clear that this is not mandatory and that everyone may basically post in his own language. Still, this is a discussion group, so you might want to write in a language actually understood by a few of us, in order to get the discussion going. Please be aware that, despite Rugby being a sport mainly for native speakers of English, some subscribers to the group don't speak English as well as you do. Please accept this. After all, according to the Official RSRU John Hill's Law, flaming a poster for poor spelling and/or grammar means you've lost the argument. If you're not sure of your spelling yourself, you could add the suffix (sp?) to the word you're not sure about. ** 1.7 Common abbreviations on rec.sport.rugby.union 3Ns - Tri Nations 6Ns - Six Nations ABs - All Blacks CC - Currie Cup (South Africa) ENC - European Nations Cup FIRA - Federation Internationale de Rugby Amateur IC - Inside centre ICC - Independent citing commissioner IR(F)B - International Rugby (Football) Board LH - Loosehead Prop MOM - Man of the match NH - Northern Hemisphere (also: North Harbour) NPC - National Provincial Championship (New Zealand) NZ - New Zealand OC - Outside centre RL - Rugby League RS - Ranfurly Shield RSRU - rec.sport.rugby.union RU - Rugby Union RWC - Rugby World Cup S12 - Super Twelve SA - South Africa (might also be: South Australia) SANZAR - South Africa, New Zealand, Australia Rugby. Can be the governing body for S12 and 3Ns, as well as the three nations itself. SH - Southern Hemisphere TH - Tighthead Prop TJ - Touch Judge TMO - Television Match Official UIOLI - Use it or lose it ZP - Zurich Premiership (England) Acronym Finder (http://www.acronymfinder.com) should help you looking up acronyms that are not related to Rugby. 1.8 About this FAQ In the early days of RSRU there was a FAQ, which was maintained by Rhodri Howell. This, however, was incomplete and had not been posted for several years, when Mees Roelofs offered to make a new one in December 1999. After a few beta versions and lots of feedback, the first finalised version was posted on 1 February 2000. On 30 January 2001 the FAQ gained approval for posting to *.answers newsgroups. The status of FAQs is being discussed regularly in all sorts of fora. In my view, a FAQ is little more than a posting that is being made regularly. The statements made here are mine; the reason RSRU regulars refer to the FAQ occasionally is that they share these views, not in the last place because many of them have helped creating and maintaining the FAQ. Bottom line: the FAQ is not law, the FAQ is not official, its information is not official and a group convention is a convention not because the FAQ says so, but because it is felt so by the readers of the group. In fact, you might want to create your own FAQ and get it approved. If you have a suggestion for the FAQ, please post it into the group first. However, if I've neglected to update things in section 2.7 (Current Holders), just notify me. You're free to publish this FAQ on your own website. It can be freely stored or distributed for non-commercial use as long as it is not changed, and the copyright notices attached to it are left intact. Conversion into HTML is allowed. However, you must make sure that the FAQ on your website is up to date. The information in this FAQ is provided "as is"; I do not accept any responsibility for the content of websites this document links to. Finally, credits go out to Mike Amm, Paul Bickerstaff, Don Black, Greig Blanchett, Myk Cameron, Jason Cormier, Ian Daley, Pete Devlin, Stephen Doyle, Andrew Forsyth, David Gallagher, John Hill, Tom Hodgson, Rhodri Howell, Tom Joyce, Declan Kealy, Paul Kendall, Klaus Mahlmann, Charlie Pearce, Henk Scholten, Will Sutton, Bill Taylor, Tom Vavasour and John Williams. RSRU FAQ (c) 2000-2006 M.M. Roelofs, Rotterdam (Netherlands) User Contributions:
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Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: roelofs@f2s.com (Mees Roelofs)
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:12 PM
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rec.sport.rugby.union FAQ: introducing rsru (part 2/4)
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rec.sport.rugby.union FAQ: introducing rsru (part 2/4)
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