alt.humor.best-of-usenet Frequently Asked Questions Submissions go to: ahbou-sub@acpub.duke.edu. Questions for the moderators go to: ahbou-mod@acpub.duke.edu. New to this update: - 'Message-ID:' header is now required (Q3 part 2) - Encryption policy broken down into two sub-sections (Q4 and Q5) - Allowance made for the 'no-repost' desires of the author (Q13--new) Herein lie the answers to the following questions:Q1: What is alt.humor.best-of-usenet about? How do I post an article?
Q2: Post <x> wasn't funny... why was it posted?
Q3: My contribution wasn't posted to alt.humor.best-of-usenet. Why?
Q4: Why do moderators encrypt articles?
Q5: How can I read an encrypted post?
Q6: Why the disclaimers in the header and the signature?
Q7: Is there an e-mail distribution or FTP archive?
Q8: Can I read by gopher or WWW?
Q9: Can I mail articles rather than post them?
Q10: How often are articles processed? How are they processed?
Q11: Which moderator posted a given article?
Q12: Why are some articles posted multiple times?
Q13: What if I don't want my writings posted to alt.humor.best-of-usenet?
Q14: What other things do the moderators think readers should know?
Q1: What is alt.humor.best-of-usenet about? How do I post an article?
The newsgroup alt.humor.best-of-usenet is for posting original usenet articles from other newsgroups, that the submitter believes represents the best of usenet humor. Some moderated newsgroups have a description like "what the moderator thinks is funny"; this is not true for a.h.b-o-u. The group is moderated to minimize the number of reposts, followups, and unrelated posts. For specific rejection criteria, see Q2 and Q3. Note that a.h.b-o-u is moderated by a team of moderators. To post an article, you can save it to a file, start a new post to newsgroup alt.humor.best-of-usenet, and include this article in your post. The article will be mailed to the moderator submission address, ahbou-sub@acpub.duke.edu. If your newsreader has the ability to mail or forward a post, you can also mail a post to ahbou-sub@acpub.duke.edu, the moderator posting address. Please do not use tin's "x"post feature; use "m"ail instead. "x"post munges the headers a lot, and sometimes cuts out parts of the original poster's name, depending on your tin options. If these parts are missing your article will fail acceptance criteria.Q2: Post <x> wasn't funny... why was it posted?
Unlike rec.humor.funny, alt.humor.best-of-usenet is not tightly moderated, nor does the moderator-team's judgment about a post's humor affect whether or not it gets posted. On the other hand, the group should reflect what the contributor believes to be the BEST of usenet humor, not just "a funny post". This means the following might be submitted and subsequently posted: (1) Posts that someone thought were humorous, even if not everyone gets it. (2) Posts that aren't particularly funny, or are in very bad taste. (3) Posts that, while humorous, may be offensive to women, ethnic or racial minorities, small rodents, or cartoon characters. Remember, there's no particular difficulty or honor involved in getting your post into alt.humor.best-of-usenet, so it's not necessary to keep submitting articles until one is accepted. Choose the best. Feel free to comment on posts in alt.humor.best-of-usenet.d or in e-mail to the submitter.Q3: My contribution wasn't posted to alt.humor.best-of-usenet. Why?
The following will not be posted (well, sometimes the moderators slip up): (1) Articles sent to any address other than ahbou-sub@acpub.duke.edu, or an alias (like best@cc.ysu.edu, the old submission address) that points to it. IN PARTICULAR, articles posted to the moderator contact mail address (ahbou-mod@acpub.duke.edu) will not be posted. (2) Articles that don't arrive with the original 'From:', 'Subject:', 'Newsgroups:' headers. 'Message-ID:' is being added to the list of required headers, but lack of same will not be grounds for rejecting a submission during this transitional phase. (3) Articles which are not submitted in their entirety. Any submission which is found to have been modified by the submitter in any way (including editing for humor value) may be rejected. If only a small part of the post is funny, then either it's not worth submitting, or you should include with the submission a "Submitter's note:" indicating where in the post the humor can be found. (4) Articles asking for reposts of old articles (post these to alt.humor. best-of-usenet.d, if you submit them they go into a black hole). (5) Commercially published articles (Dave Barry's "Fish Tale" about blowing up the whale, for example). (6) Copier humor; examples include (but are not limited to): "Mouse Balls", "Administratium", "Super High Intensity Training" and "Recipe for a Woman/Man". These are the sorts of things which get hung by the photocopier at work, and everyone who thinks they are funny takes a copy for themselves. They are not original, did not originate in a newsgroup, and therefore don't qualify. (Besides, they've probably been posted to rec.humor in the last month.) (7) Urban legends--the $250 cookie recipe, for example (submissions from a.f.urban are fine, but it should be in the post you're submitting, not the many-times-circulated legend that started the topic). (8) Articles that have been badly mangled by newsreaders, so that the original formatting has become illegible. This includes saving a thread of articles to a single file, without editing of any sorts, and submitting them as one article (see below). (9) Articles submitted only because the .sig is humorous. If the .sig is really stupid and it's bigger than 4x80 (the accepted maximum size for Usenet .sigs), you can post it to alt.fan.warlord instead. The FAQ for a.f.w. is at http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/afw/ and should be read before posting in that group. Generally, the moderators don't send non-acceptance notices, but if the moderator that gets your post has questions they'll write back.Q4: Why do moderators encrypt articles?
Moderators of ahbou do not edit the content of articles (with the exception of addresses--see Q10); any modification of submissions is done for the purposes of readability and conformity. As a result of this policy, some articles are rot13-encrypted because the moderator feels that they may be offensive to certain groups. These articles are usually preceded by a disclaimer from the moderators advising that the article may be offensive. Posts are encrypted for the same reason that a bookstore owner might put offensive material on a higher shelf--as a courtesy to the customer. Each moderator makes individual decisions as to which articles to encrypt (tending to err on the side of caution after the "Barney the Nazi Dinosaur" incident; see Q6). Numerous moderators makes for numerous standards of what may or may not be considered offensive. Generally, we try to encrypt articles based on previous experiences with the tolerance levels of the cyberspace community. If you found an unencrypted posting to be offensive or did not understand why a given post was encrypted, please contact the moderators via the mailing list so that we can take your opinions into consideration for future postings.Q5: How can I read an encrypted post?
Some articles are rot13-encrypted, and most newsreaders have the decoding built-in. Thanks to the various readers that have submitted the following instructions: rn/trn: ctl-x tin: d nn/slrn: D gnus: C-c C-r PSU NetNews: "rot13" anu-news: read/rot13 vms vnews: x Yarn (offline reader): x WinVN: ctl-r FreeAgent/Agent: ctl-r Most MS-Windows newsreaders: ROT13 from one of the menus The encryption itself is very simple, every letter is shifted 13 bytes, ie a->n, B->O, M->Z, o->b, etc. Non-letters are untouched. If all else fails, pipe it through a script like this (or use this as the base for a program of your own design, in whatever language/OS you prefer): #! /bin/sh tr 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'\ 'nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM' (For the purists that say I should've used 'a-zA-Z' instead, remember that some "popular" systems don't have the letters as consecutive values.)Q6: Why the disclaimers in the header and the signature?
Because the moderators hope to not be forced to resign moderating--or resign their job--under duress, because of postings submitted by others.Q7: Is there an e-mail distribution or FTP archive?
While a.h.b-o-u still lacks e-mail distribution, an archive site has been created and is being maintained for this newsgroup. It is neither under the direct control nor in any way affiliated with the moderators of this group. As such, no claims are made for either the contents or accuracy of this site (or even its continued existence!) but it seemed excellent at first glance. The address is: http://www.krl.caltech.edu/~brown/news/bou-html There are over 2300 articles archived there, with the oldest reported one being May 15, 1995. Search engines are available to make browsing easier. Thanks go out to the creator of this site and all the effort put in to making it user-friendly and keeping it maintained.Q8: Can I read by gopher or WWW?
Via WWW: gopher://news.ysu.edu:2070/1ls%20alt.humor.best-of-usenet Via gopher: Path=ls alt.humor.best-of-usenet Name=alt.humor.best-of-usenet Host=news.ysu.edu Port=2070 Type=1 (command line: gopher -p "ls alt.humor.best-of-usenet" news.ysu.edu 2070)Q9: Can I mail articles rather than post them?
Yes. If your news-posting software doesn't handle posts to moderated newsgroups correctly, or if you prefer using e-mail, or for whatever other reason, you can mail posts directly to ahbou-sub@acpub.duke.edu. This is the same address that news software automatically forwards posts to.Q10: How often are articles processed? How are they processed?
An article is delivered in a rotating fashion to one of several group moderators for alt.humor.best-of-usenet. The length of time from delivery to posting is dependent upon the recipient--each moderator does articles as they have time, and some clean out their queues more frequently than others. To prepare the articles for posting, most of the original post's headers are removed, and the submitter's headers are edited down to the From: line and the original Subject: line, which is edited to contain a reference to one or more newsgroups where the post was originally found. Finally a script is run that tacks on the remainder of necessary headers and the disclaimers, and the article is posted. All .sig files and sign-offs are removed from the submitted post as a matter of course. A particular moderator may choose to leave this in if, in his estimation, it adds to the humor value of the submission. If you don't want to leave things to chance, make sure to include a note saying that the .sig should be kept and explaining why. Moderators remove or XXX out e-mail, snail-mail and website addresses contained within submissions, to protect both themselves and the subject of the submission. This removal is routine where the addresses are intended to advertise or solicit, and at the discretion of individual moderators in all other situations. Submissions which contain multiple instances of such addresses may be rejected at the moderator's discretion.Q11: Which moderator posted a given article?
Check the 'Originator:' and/or 'Sender:' headers of the article in question. Note that different moderators use different posting software, so this field may have a different name; nonetheless, something in the headers should allow you to identify which group-moderator was responsible for posting any given post. Moderators may also use an 'X-Posting- Moderator:' header.Q12: Why are some articles posted multiple times?
When articles are submitted, they go into a queue and are forwarded to one of the moderators in a round-robin style. If many people submitted an article, or the same person submitted the same article multiple times, then it is likely that several different moderators will get copies of that article to format and post. We try and catch the duplicates by reading the newsgroup before posting submissions, but we are only human and occasionally make mistakes. Also, moderators reside in both North America and Europe; propagation delays of several days have been observed between the posting of an article on one continent and its arrival on another. This sort of thing makes it impossible for even the most careful moderator to catch all the mistakes. Recently, a scheme has been added to reduce multiple postings of the same article by different moderators. The 'Message-ID:' of the original article is kept intact with the added string 'ahbou=' prepended to it. Thus, if you are pre-formatting your submission, please do not remove this header.Q13: What if I don't want my writings posted to alt.humor.best-of-usenet?
In an attempt to remain compliant with the wishes of the original author of a submission, moderators will not approve any submission which has either of the following: - 'X-No-Archive: yes' in the header or article body - An explicit message in the .sig which clearly states the author's desire that the article not be reposted. The major drawback in this policy is that it relies on the integrity and complicity of the submitters. If the relevant header or portion of the .sig is removed from the submission, through either ignorance or malice, then unless the recipient moderator locates the original article (which is neither required nor always possible) he has no way of knowing that it was ever there. Thus, while moderators agree to do the best job they can to enforce this scheme, there will always be those submissions that fall through the cracks.Q14: What other things do the moderators think readers should know?
(1) Submissions that contain more than one article are a hassle. The ideal way to submit these: save the best two or three articles of the thread to a file, separate each article by a line of dashes or equal signs, and edit the headers as described in Q9. (2) Posts that use mime base64 encoding, uuencoding, rot13 encoding and the like are a pain. Please use standard octet-stream encoding. (3) If a post is from a commercial source, drop a line to the moderators list, ahbou-mod@acpub.duke.edu, and one of the moderators will cancel it. We try to catch these, not always successfully. (4) It's not necessary to PGP-sign your posts. The moderators cut them out anyway. (5) There exists an unmoderated group with a function similar to a.h.b-o-u called alt.usenet.reposts. Postings to this group are not restricted in any way, and may be merely 'interesting' as opposed to humorous. The moderators as a group may be contacted by sending e-mail to ahbou-mod@acpub.duke.edu. Submissions go to ahbou-sub@acpub.duke.edu.
Last-modified: December 21st, 1996
Maintainer: Shane Travis <travis@sedsystems.ca>