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Posting Articles

Posting and responding to articles can be done from either reading mode or selection mode. Two important notes concerning posting:

  1. Be aware of general network etiquette. Take a look at the articles in the newsgroup `news.announce.newusers' for information about netiquette. See section News Etiquette, for more info.
  2. Use a test newsgroup when learning how to post articles. Use a local one if available (we have a `psu.test' newsgroup for psu testing and an or.test for oregon distribution). Otherwise, use alt.test or misc.test.

The following commands are available for posting and responding. The first three give you the option of including the current article.

R
Reply through electronic mail to the author of the article. This is the preferred way to respond unless you think your article will be of general interest.

F
Follow-up with an article in the same newsgroup.

M
Mail a letter to someone.

:post
Post a new article to any newsgroup. News offers two features: cross-posting and distribution control. Cross-posting means that you can post the same article to more than one group. Do this by entering a comma separated list of newsgroups when nn asks for the newsgroup.

Distribution refers to who will see it. Sometimes the issue may be of interest only to the local community. In these cases you should choose as small a distribution as possible. This helps reduce network congestion. At PSU CS, we have the following possible distributions:

psu
Computer Science
psu
Portland State University
pdx
Portland area
or
Oregon
usa
United States
na
North America
world
Everywhere

When you are done editing your response you will be prompted with several options. The two that are used the most often are send to send the letter or post the article and abort to throw the letter/article away.

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