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In addition to grouping articles in hierarchies, Usenet also provides a feature for limiting the spread of an article within the news system. New distributions provide a mechanism for limiting articles to a particular geographic area. If a distribution is set to a particular area, only sites within that distribution area receive the article. The systems administrator at each site decides what distributions apply to that site.
Why limit the distribution of an article? Suppose that you live in North Carolina and you’re posting a meeting announcement for a local user group meeting. It’s unlikely that Usenet readers in Australia are interested in your meeting. By limiting the distribution of your article to the appropriate geographical area, you can save network bandwidth, reduce the cost of sending your message, and reduce the aggravation of users around the world who have to read your message.
You can limit the distribution of your article by including a Distribution: line in the header of your article as you post it. Most news readers ask you for the distribution when you post an article. After the colon in the Distribution: line, enter the appropriate geographical distribution. Table 34.3 lists some commonly used news distribution areas.
| Value | Explanation |
|---|---|
| local | Typically, articles with a local distribution are limited to a group of local news servers within your organization. This distribution is often used for local organizational newsgroups. |
| nc | Every state has a statewide distribution that’s the same as the postal abbreviation for the state. The Distribution:nc used in this example limits the article to machines within the state of North Carolina. |
| us | Sends the article to all Usenet sites in the United States. |
| na | Sends the article to all Usenet sites in North America. |
| world | Sends the article to every reachable Usenet site in the world. Typically, this is the default distribution if no other distribution value is specified. |
Your site may have some additional distributions that apply. There may be organization-wide or regional distributions that you can use to determine the scope of your article. In general, you should try to pick a distribution that sends your article only to the areas where it will be of interest.
That Usenet has no central authority mystifies many people. Your local systems administrator really has authority over only the local system. No central group or organization dictates policy or takes complaints. Despite this glaring lack of regulated structure, Usenet works remarkably well. In fact, many people argue that it works better than if there were some central authority.
How do things keep working in an orderly manner? Usenet is run by cooperation between sites and by customs that have evolved over its life.
Usenet tends to be very good at policing itself. If a user starts to abuse the network, you can rest assured that the user and his or her systems administrator will get thousands of e-mail messages and several phone calls about the problem. This usually results in quick problem resolution.
Usenet has a particular culture all its own. You should take some time to try to become familiar with the facets of this culture before just diving in. Life on Usenet will be much easier if you do.
In the past few years, many online communication services have added Usenet news as a feature. As a result, tens of thousands of people who are new to Usenet have started reading and posting Usenet news. Many of these users have complained about Usenet participants being rude or generally unlike the users of their online service. Well, the culture of Usenet is different from almost any other information service that you’ll find. It’s not better or worse—just different. If you try to make allowances for differences in Net culture, you’ll probably find that your experiences on Usenet are a bit easier to handle.
Well over 1 million people—probably several million, though no one knows for sure—read and post Usenet news articles daily. These people are from all occupations, all walks of life, and many different countries around the world. Because Usenet news is carried on computers all over the world, it truly forms an international community. Many of the people that you encounter on Usenet don’t speak English as a primary language. You can’t assume that the people reading your articles share your cultural background, ethnic group, religion, or social values. The most that you can assume is that whoever reads your article is probably very different from you in several ways.
One aspect of Usenet culture, the flame, is usually an unpleasant experience for new users. A flame is a rude message, usually degrading and filled with insults that someone posts in response to one of your articles. Unfortunately, as you’ll see, you can do very little about flames other than ignore them. Usenet is far too large a place for you to try to make everyone happy, and some people really seem to like flaming other people just for the fun of it. Perhaps they find it cheaper than psychotherapy….
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