On Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:06:58 GMT, Jose
wrote in ::

So it is _information_ (not personal experience) that is crucial for
on-topic articles posted to this newsgroup.

Well then most of the articles here are off topic. And I daresay
personal experience counts as information.

Are you saying most of the articles posted to rec.aviation.piloting
contain no information? If true, then this newsgroup would be more
like an electronic bulletin board than a member of the Usenet
hierarchy.

As for the definition of spam, we all write our own dictionaries, don't
we?

I rely on Merriam-Webster myself.

And even a teeny bit of Hormel canned spiced ham is still spam.

Actually it's Spam (not spam).

Please be aware that spam is not defined as a commercial solicitation.
Such commercial announcements and solicitations are considered
on-topic if:

* They contain information
* They are relevant to the newsgroup topic
* They are only posted occasionally as the information they
contain
is updated, revised or their 'Expires' message header is
reached.
* They are not cross-posted
* They are not excessively posted to multiple newsgroups.

So, informative commercial announcements don't truly qualify as spam.
In any event, Mr. Rhine's article was more of a personal
recommendation than a commercial announcement that would benefit him.

That said, of course it would have been more effective if he had
chosen to share more details of his personal experience, but being
ineffective alone doesn't qualify it as spam.

Please don't take my comments as a personal affront against you; I'm
just trying to provide some insightful information.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup_spam
Newsgroup spam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet
newsgroups.

Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. The
first widely recognized Usenet spam (though not the most famous)
was posted on January 18, 1994 by Clarence L. Thomas IV, a
sysadmin at Andrews University. Entitled "Global Alert for All:
Jesus is Coming Soon", it was a fundamentalist religious tract
claiming that "this world's history is coming to a climax." The
newsgroup posting bot Serdar Argic also appeared in early 1994,
posting tens of thousands of messages to various newsgroups,
consisting of identical copies of a political screed relating to
the Armenian Genocide.

The first commercial Usenet spam, and the one which is often
(mistakenly) claimed to be the first Usenet spam of any sort, was
an advertisement for legal services entitled "Green Card Lottery -
Final One?". It was posted in April 1994 by Arizona lawyers
Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, and hawked legal representation
for United States immigrants seeking papers ("green cards").

Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting,
that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially
similar messages). During the early 1990s there was substantial
controversy among Usenet system administrators (news admins) over
the use of cancel messages to control spam. A cancel message is a
directive to news servers to delete a posting, causing it to be
inaccessible to those who might read it. Some regarded this as a
bad precedent, leaning towards censorship, while others considered
it a proper use of the available tools to control the growing spam
problem.

A culture of neutrality towards content precluded defining spam on
the basis of advertisement or commercial solicitations. The word
"spam" was usually taken to mean excessive multiple posting (EMP),
and other neologisms were coined for other abuses — such as
"velveeta" (from the processed cheese product) for excessive
cross-posting. [1] A subset of spam was deemed cancellable spam,
for which it is considered justified to issue third-party cancel
messages. [2]

In the late 1990s, spam became used as a means of vandalizing
newsgroups, with malicious users committing acts of sporgery to
make targeted newsgroups all but unreadable without heavily
filtering. A prominent example occurred in
alt.religion.scientology. Another known example is the Meow Wars.

The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the
Breidbart Index* as an objective measure of a message's
"spamminess". The use of the BI and spam-detection software has
led to Usenet being policed by anti-spam volunteers, who purge
newsgroups of spam by sending cancels and filtering it out on the
way into servers. This very active form of policing has meant that
Usenet is a far less attractive target to spammers than it used to
be, and most of the industrial-scale spammers have now moved into
e-mail spam instead.


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breidbart_Index
Breidbart Index
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
The Breidbart Index, developed by Seth Breidbart, provides a
measure of severity of newsgroup spam. The Breidbart Index is
calculated over a 45-day window, and takes into account the number
of newsgroups to which a message is posted. It is defined as the
sum over each copy of the message of the square root of the number
of newsgroups that copy is cross posted to. Articles are
considered the same if they are substantively identical.

For the Big 8 and alt.* hierarchies, it's generally agreed that
messages are cancellable spam when the Breidbart Index exceeds 20,
at which point they can be auto-cancelled from news servers. Other
hierarchies have their own rules; many (smaller, local ones) are
much more restrictive.

Here's another definition:

http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html#2.1
2.1) What is Spam?
It's a luncheon meat, kinda pink, comes in a can, made by Hormel.
Most Americans intuitively, viscerally associate "Spam" with "no
nutritive or aesthetic value," though it is still relatively
popular (especially in Hawaii) and can be found in almost any
grocery store.) The canned luncheon meat has its own newsgroup,
alt.spam.

The term "spam," as used on this newsgroup, means "the same
article (or essentially the same article) posted an unacceptably
high number of times to one or more newsgroups." CONTENT IS
IRRELEVANT. 'Spam' doesn't mean "ads." It doesn't mean "abuse." It
doesn't mean "posts whose content I object to." Spam is a funky
name for a phenomenon that can be measured pretty objectively: did
that post appear X times? (See 3.1, "Yeah, but how many is X?')

There have been "customized" spams where each post made some
effort to apply to each individual newsgroup, but the general
thrust of each article was the same. A huge straw poll on
news.admin.policy, news.admin.misc, and
alt.current-events.net-abuse (December 1994) showed that as many
of 90% of the readers felt that cancellations for these posts were
justified. So, simply put: if you plan to post the same or
extremely similar messages to dozens of newsgroups, the posts are
probably going to get cancelled.

If you feel that a massive multi-post you are planning constitutes
an exception, you are more than welcome to run the idea past the
readers of news.admin.net-abuse.usenet for feedback first.



You'll find a definitive article on the subject of spam he
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)

Here's what the federal government has to say about spam:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/spamalrt.htm

Here's some good fundamental Usenet information:
http://kb.iu.edu/data/apen.html