Policy on Posting to Many Groups

How Many Groups can I hit at once?

Our Rules on netiquette explicitly forbid

spamming the net with commercial or non-commercial postings.
and
maliciously or wantonly flooding newsgroups.

We have software in place to prevent flooding. It's called "shogun" and, by default, it limits users to 100 articles in a 24-hour period, with a warning after 50 posts. After that, the software holds articles, pending staff's decision that they are not spam.

It is not our policy to interfere with appropriate news postings, and we will generally, upon request, raise the posting limit of users who frequently receive warnings and whose posts are not in violation of netnews etiquette.

The software counts a crossposted article as having been posted to half as many groups (rounded up) as it was posted to. Crossposts are limited, in any case, to six groups.

If you are considering requesting an increase in posting parameters, please bear the following in mind.

Panix explicitly declines to express a numerical boundary at which a posting becomes an instance of spamming or flooding, but this does not mean we have no rule. We have both a guideline for users and a procedural implementation for enforcing the rule.

The guideline is this: There are very few articles that are appropriate for posting to as many as five groups. One fairly common exception is announcements (which seldom have many followups and/or where followups are directed to a single group).

This is the procedure we suggest:
If you are inclined to post an article to as many as five groups, think very carefully about it, and be absolutely sure that you know the purpose of every group on your list; if you have any reason to think that your posting might be a violation of netiquette, please ask Panix staff. If you don't ask us and post anyhow, you may be posting inappropriately. Depending on how serious staff feels the violation to be, you may receive a warning that any repetition or similar misbehavior will result in our refusal to renew your account when it expires, or, in extreme cases, in termination of your account without refund. (This is the implementation.)

Decision of the Panix staff in such cases will be final.

The guideline number of five is not a guarantee that articles posted to fewer than five groups are proof against staff warning and probation, but in general users should be aware that the greater the number of groups to which an article is posted, the greater the risk of staff action.