MOD: Business Newsgroup Policies

Business Group Moderators · Guest

INTRODUCTION
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The newsgroups misc.business.consulting, misc.entrepreneurs.moderated,
misc.business.moderated, and misc.business.marketing.moderated are moderated
discussion groups. This periodic post summarizes the current posting policies
all posters are expected to follow for these four newsgroups. Please read this
policy document before posting.

George Demmer, Scott Jensen, Jim Logajan, and Mike Turco are the current
business newsgroups volunteer moderators. You may contact us collectively by
sending e-mail to: business-moderators at Lugoj com (substitute "@" for " at "
and insert a "." between Lugoj and com).

If your post does not appear within 48 hours and you haven't seen a rejection
e-mail from us, then it is possible your post never made it to us or the
rejection never made it to you. In such cases you should e-mail us at the
address listed above. On rare occasions a post that is borderline may require
discussion among the moderators, which may take a few days to run to completion.

To help you determine which newsgroup your post would be most appropriate in
and what is acceptable to post, excerpts from the original charters are
included below, followed by a list of things that will be rejected from all
four groups:

MISC.BUSINESS.CONSULTING
------------------------
"Misc.business.consulting is a forum for discussions concerning the business
issues of consulting. More specifically, this refers to matters such as tax
rulings, clarification of accounting treatments, techniques for client
management, discussions of ethics, advice for beginning consultants, contract
provisions, etc. This should not be taken to totally exclude technical issues
from being raised, when they are framed in the context of the business of
consulting."

MISC.BUSINESS.MODERATED
-----------------------
"The newsgroup misc.business.moderated [is] a moderated forum for discussion
and debate involving all aspects of business not presently being served by
other business newsgroups. It [is] a newsgroup where professors, managers,
entrepreneurs, students and anyone interested in business can establish
contacts, share, learn and exchange practical and theoretical business thoughts
from the world over."

MISC.BUSINESS.MARKETING.MODERATED
---------------------------------
"The newsgroup misc.business.marketing.moderated [is] a moderated forum for
discussion and debate involving all aspects of marketing. It [is] a newsgroup
where professors, managers, entrepreneurs, students and anyone interested in
marketing can establish contacts, share, learn and exchange practical and
theoretical marketing thoughts from the world over."

MISC.ENTREPRENEURS.MODERATED
----------------------------
"The newsgroup is for the purposes of moderated discussion of entrepreneurial
and small-business topics, like: starting a business, finding capital, running
operations, controlling costs, obtaining appropriate products and services,
handling employees, filing patents, handling tax laws, obtaining credit-card
and check processing, etc."

MESSAGE CATEGORIES SUBJECT TO REJECTION
---------------------------------------
The following message categories are subject to rejection (or warnings, where
noted) in all four newsgroups. Except where noted, an attempt will be made to
e-mail the original poster (OP) when their post has been rejected.

SPAM
Posts that are obvious spam are rejected without informing the poster. Spam is
considered to include advertising and promotional messages and messages sent in
bulk to multiple destinations (whether the content is topical or not).

ADVERTISING
The rare posts that appear to us to be sincerely misdirected ads or "job
wanted" posts will be rejected with a response. Likewise, responses to posts
seeking product or service recommendations that appear to be attempts to sell
the OP products or services will be rejected. If you are trying to sell
something to the OP, you should contact them directly if they have indicated
such sales pitches are welcome.

PERSONAL ATTACKS
Excessively personal attacks (ad hominem) will be rejected. It is quite
acceptable to post disagreements to a poster's ideas or advice, but it is not
acceptable to attack the poster personally.

SURVEYS
Requests for readers to fill out a survey (whether by e-mail or on a web site)
may be rejected because such requests will yield a statistically invalid
population of responses - yielding dangerously misleading results for the
poster and a waste of time for respondents. Other times these surveys are
thinly disguised mechanisms for promoting some product or service.

MIME/HTML
If an on topic posting arrives in MIME or HTML, we will try to clean it up to
plain text if it appears to be the first posting by a poster. A warning notice
is issued to the poster. We reserve the right to reject subsequent MIME/HTML
postings by such persons. Usenet is traditionally plain-text and the software
used by many readers does not support proper rendition of MIME/HTML.

NEWS, ARTICLES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Business news, articles, and announcements are rejected on the grounds that
these are discussion groups, and such things are more appropriate in other
forums. Such things tend to be self-promotional in any case and generally
aren't intended to solicit genuine dialogue.

CROSSPOSTING
Inappropriate cross-posting to other newsgroups may either be rejected or the
list of newsgroups may be trimmed before approval. If trimmed and approved, the
list of newsgroups where the post is considered off topic will be removed and
the poster is warned that their posting will only appear in the unelided
newsgroups.

EXCESSIVE QUOTING AND TOP POSTING
Replies that are top posted, or contain an excessive amount of quoted material,
will not be rejected for those reasons but a warning may be sent to the poster.
We reserve the right to trim or even delete any quoted material we may deem
excessive. An explanation of why we dislike excessive quoting and top posting
is on Google's web site, among others:
http://www.google.com/googlegroups/posting_style.html#summarize
http://web.presby.edu/~nnqadmin/nnq/nquote.html

OFF TOPIC
If the posting is, in our judgment, off-topic for the newsgroup then we may
reject it. On occasion we do allow follow-up posts to threads to drift off
topic, but are less likely to allow a new thread to be started that begins off
topic.

OTHER
Since it is not possible for us to anticipate and itemize all possible reasons
for rejection, we must reserve the right to reject for reasons not previously
listed. We will however strive to allow as much dialogue as humanly possible
since we realize that posters and readers would abandon any newsgroup that is
moderated in an ad hoc or unjust manner.

Thank you for reading this policy document.