misc.forsale.computers.pc-specific.misc Other PC-specific equipment.
misc.forsale.computers.pc-specific.motherboards PC motherboards.
misc.forsale.computers.pc-specific.portables    Portable PC systems.
misc.forsale.computers.pc-specific.software     PC software.
misc.forsale.computers.pc-specific.systems      Complete PC systems.
misc.forsale.computers.printers Printers and plotters for sale and wanted.
misc.forsale.computers.storage  Disk, CDROM, tape drives for sale and wanted.
misc.forsale.computers.workstation      Workstation related computer items.
misc.forsale.non-computer       Non-computer items for sale and wanted.

There are other options as well:

1) If and only if you are with a computer company which is releasing a new
product and you want to make word of this new product known to the
computing community, you can post a notice to the moderated newsgroup
comp.newprod.  The moderator, Chip Rosenthal, requires submissions to be
informative and hype-free so people will use comp.newprod as a reliable
way of gaining information.

2) Each part of the world tends to have what's called a 'local hierarchy
of newsgroups' -- newsgroups limited to a geographic area.  For example,
central North Carolina (home of the so-called Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill
"Research Triangle") has a local hierarchy called triangle.*.  In your
local hierarchy, if one exists (and not everyone has one, but most people
do), you'll often find groups with names like *.classifieds, *.forsale,
*.wanted: triangle.forsale and triangle.wanted are the groups in the
aforementioned triangle.* hierarchy.

3) There is a hierarchy of newsgroups called "biz.*" which exist mainly
for announcement from companies of new products, fixes and enhancements,
postings of demo software, and so forth.  If your site carries biz.*, and
you feel that a biz.* hierarchy group would suit your purposes, go to
biz.config and ask for it.

Here are existing biz.* groups:

biz.americast           AmeriCast announcements.
biz.americast.samples   Samples of AmeriCast. (Moderated)
biz.books.technical     Technical bookstore & publisher advertising & info.
biz.clarinet            Announcements about ClariNet.
biz.clarinet.sample     Samples of ClariNet newsgroups for the outside world.
biz.comp.accounting     Dialogue specific to the accounting software industry.
biz.comp.hardware       Generic commercial hardware postings.
biz.comp.mcs            MCSNet. (Moderated)
biz.comp.services       Generic commercial service postings.
biz.comp.software       Generic commercial software postings.
biz.comp.telebit        Support of the Telebit modem.
biz.comp.telebit.netblazer      The Telebit Netblazer.
biz.config              Biz Usenet configuration and administration.
biz.dec                 DEC equipment & software.
biz.dec.decathena       DECathena discussions.
biz.dec.decnews         The DECNews newsletter. (Moderated)
biz.dec.ip              IP networking on DEC machines.
biz.digex.announce      Announcements from Digex. (Moderated)
biz.digital.announce    DEC news & announcements. (Moderated)
biz.digital.articles    DEC newsletter, catalog & journal. (Moderated)
biz.general             Dialogue related to business operations & offerings.
biz.jobs.offered        Position announcements.
biz.misc                Miscellaneous postings of a commercial nature.
biz.next.newprod        New product announcements for the NeXT.
biz.oreilly.announce    New prod. announcements from O'Reilly & Assoc. (Mod)
biz.pagesat             For discussion Pagesat Satellite Usenet Newsfeed.
biz.sco.announce        SCO and related product announcements. (Moderated)
biz.sco.binaries        Binary packages for SCO Xenix, UNIX, or ODT. (Mod)
biz.sco.general         Q&A, discussions and comments on SCO products.
biz.sco.magazine        To discuss SCO Magazine and its contents.
biz.sco.opendesktop     ODT environment and applications tech info, q&a.
biz.sco.sources         Source code ported to an SCO operating env. (Mod)
biz.sco.vtcl            SCO Visual Tcl.
biz.stolen              Postings about stolen merchandise.
biz.stortek.forum       Storage Technology Corporation.
biz.tadpole.sparcbook   Discussions on the Sparcbook portable computer.
biz.test                Biz newsgroup test messages.
biz.univel.misc         Discussions and comments on Univel products.
biz.zeos.announce       Zeos Product Announcements. (Moderated)
biz.zeos.general        Zeos technical support and general information.

Not every company's goods will be appropriate for a biz.* hierarchy
newsgroup, and not every site will carry biz.*.  It's up to the people
who run your particular site.

4) If you or your company have an advertisement that's relevant to an
existing newsgroup or newsgroups you can post informational postings to
those newsgroups.  However, you are strongly encouraged to keep such
postings hype-free.  What often works very well is to post information
about your services or product and include a contact address, World Wide
Web site, or phone number for people to use to get more information.

For example, if you want to post a notice about your immigration law
services, you could post a message to alt.visa.us or the various
misc.immigration newsgroups, where you'd find a large population of people
interested in that or related subjects.  Posting the same ad to
rec.sport.football.college would *not* be appropriate because
rec.sport.football.college has nothing to do with immigration law, visas,
or becoming an American citizen.

This is not to say that such ads will always be welcome; the proliferation
of inappropriate ads (ads posted in the wrong way to the wrong place) has
resulted in *all* ads, even informational ads posted to the appropriate
newsgroup, tending to get a cold shoulder if not worse.  You can help by
limiting your ads to *informational* postings posted *only* *where*
*appropriate*.

5) In certain cases, you will find groups with 'marketplace' in their
names... for example, rec.games.board.marketplace.  Groups with that word
in their name are intended for buying, selling, and trading items of that
subject or type; for example, rec.games.board.marketplace is the
appropriate place to post a notice if you have a vintage copy of Monopoly
or Diplomacy to sell.

How not to do it
----------------

Unfortunately, there are just about as many *inappropriate* ways to
advertise on Usenet as there are appropriate ways.

1) The first way NOT to do it is to post off-topic ads in off-topic
newsgroups.

For example, you run a rug company.  So you post an advertisement about
your rugs in news.newusers.questions.  Not surprisingly, a lot of people
send you email telling you what a jerk you are.

Why'd they do this, you ask?  It's simple: news.newusers.questions has
nothing to do with selling rugs.  Your ad was as off-topic as if someone
had tried to get a discussion going there about the upcoming football
season or started posting a lot of messages about their recent vacation.

Suppose you own that rug company, and you regularly read
rec.crafts.textiles.weaving.  Would you like it if someone started coming
in and posting a lot of ads to the newsgroup about some homeopathic
ginseng tablets, and then someone else came in and started trying to sell
magazine subscriptions, and it became hard to find discussion of weaving?

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" isn't just a good
idea on Usenet.  It's the way things are, and if you act rudely by
posting ads in newsgroups that have nothing to do with what you're
advertising, people will be very unhappy with you.

2) Spamming.

Spamming is defined as posting identical or nearly-identical ads to a lot
of newsgroups, one right after the other.  Since it's really not that
difficult to write a program that will post the same advertisement to
dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of newsgroups, a lot of people have
taken to doing this.

What's happened to people who've spammed?

They've lost their accounts, been mail-bombed (had thousands of pieces of
junk email sent to them), had people call up and yell at them in the
middle of the night, had people forward their mail (by this I mean MAIL
mail, not email) to someplace strange, had people sign them up for
thousands of unwanted magazine subscriptions, had people send them
thousands of pages of condemnatory faxes, and so forth.

*Nothing* is as hated on Usenet as spamming.  It's extremely, unbelievably
rude and if you do it, you *will* come to regret it.  This is not a threat
-- it's an observation. Any benefits spamming might have brought you will
be more than counteracted by the intense public outcry against you in
every newsgroup you posted your ad to.

Some members of the media have gotten the mistaken impression that
spamming is hated because it's *advertising*.  It's true that Usenet
readers don't have much fondness for advertising, but the real reason
spamming is hated so much is because it's unbelievably *rude*.  Each copy
of the ad takes up disk space on thousands of machines around the world --
and if you post the ad 1000 times, that's millions of copies of your
message that *you* are making other people pay to store copies of.  When
you spam, you're hogging hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of other
people's storage space.

So please, don't do it.  I've already explained that *one* copy of an
off-topic ad is rude because it has nothing to do with the group it was
posted to.  Multiply that by a thousand times to get an idea of how rude
it is to spam.

Another consideration against spamming is that Usenet readers developed
defenses against it, so it's not very effective.  There are quite a few
spam detectors running on Usenet, and if one of them detects that the same
message has been posted repeatedly to multiple newsgroups, the humans who
run those spam detectors will step in and actually *erase* the spamming
messages with 'cancel' messages which are honored at most sites around the
world.

A common misconception shared by many members of the media is that
spam is bad because it's *advertising* and that people who cancel spam are
doing so to get rid of *advertising*.  In actual point of fact, most
Usenet users consider cancellation to be extremely bad manners and
something to be done only as a last resort.  When spam-cancellers cancel
spam, it's done because of the *volume* (posting hundreds of times), not
because of the content.

The analogy that's often used is that yes, you have the right to walk down
the street and say whatever you like -- but you do NOT have the right to
stick your head in someone's house at 3 am and shout through a bullhorn.

So if you *do* spam, you're likely to lose your account, have your
personal life made a living hell, possibly get sued by people whose
storage space you're taking up, and not very many people are going to pay
attention to or even see your advertisement.   It's just plain not worth
the grief you'll get.

Sorry to be unpleasant about it, but spam's a really bad idea.

Finally, if you're wondering where the term "spamming" came from, it came
from a Monty Python sketch in which the characters were in a restaurant
which mainly sold spam.  Items on the menu included things like "spam,
spam, spam, eggs, ham, and spam."  Whenever the waitress recited the menu,
a group of Vikings in the corner would chime in with her, chanting the
word "spam" over and over, drowning out everything else.  Some members of
the media have spread the explanation that the word "spamming" derives
from throwing chunks of spam into a fan.  This is not the case.

3) Don't send unsolicited ads via email to people you've seen post.

Another often-practiced and often-punished scheme is to send email to
mailing lists compiled from various newsgroups; people who've posted to
this group or that in the last two weeks wind up on occasion getting ads
for timeshare condos in Cancun or dubious credit schemes.

Suffice it to say that junk email, using Usenet posters' addresses, is
also a really bad idea.  Most sites will yank your account if you do that
kind of thing.

4) Don't mail-merge ads either in order to avoid being called a spammer.

Some advertisers noticed that it was only *identical* postings that were
getting cancelled by the spam cancellers, and cleverly came up with a way
to post their ad to dozens of newsgroups while varying a line or two to
make it look sufficiently different to avoid being cancelled.

For example, one book editor posted ads to dozens of newsgroups about his
book, essentially giving a sales pitch for said book, while adding a
paragraph to each article that purported to contain the text that had been
printed about the given newsgroup in said book.  It was rather obvious
that the editor wasn't interested in getting comments on the text, since
the book had already been published, and eventually an employee at the
company admitted that the technique had been used to try to avoid
triggering the spam cancellers and that the point had indeed been to
broadcast the ad widely.

It's to your ultimate benefit *not* to do the Usenet equivalent of
sweepstakes ads; don't do postings that say things like "Congratulations,
REC.FOOD.DRINK.BEER reader, you are among the lucky few to be included in
this amazing offer."

Conclusion
----------

To make a long story short, off-topic advertising and advertising that
equates to a bullhorn stuck into someone's window in the middle of the
night is a bad idea.  *Please* exercise restraint and don't make the
mistake many have of thinking that just because there's no central
authority that can punish you for spamming newsgroups, that there will be
no consequences if you do.  There will be, and you might be surprised by
the lengths the vengeful Usenet readers can go to when someone spams their
favorite group with yet another off-topic advertisement.  If you want to
advertise on Usenet, you can, but please follow the tips contained in
this document's "How to do it"s section and don't make the mistakes
listed in "How not to do it."


Afterword: Advertising on the Internet
--------------------------------------

It should be noted that there are many ways to advertise on the
Internet that don't involve Usenet at all.  Usenet, you see, is NOT the
same thing as the Internet.  Usenet is transmitted via the Internet, but
is also transmitted via other means (See "What is Usenet" in
news.announce.newusers for more information).  The Internet also includes
services like ftp, telnet, gopher, and the World Wide Web, and no one's
going to cause you the least difficulty if you use them to advertise.

As a matter of fact, thousands of companies have their very own WWW pages
up for people around the planet to use, look at, and get information
from.  A World Wide Web page allows you to put up graphics, text, and
sound in an interactive hypertext format that's remarkably easy to set up
and use via a program like Mosaic or Netscape.

So, here's a parting tip: if you want to advertise via the Internet, get
a WWW page set up, then let people in appropriate newsgroups (and
elsewhere) know where to find it.  If you need help getting going, ask
the people who run your site or scout out the Usenet newsgroup
comp.infosystems.www.misc for help.  It's really not that hard to set up
a WWW page, and hey, if you build it, they will come.

Just don't spam anyone in the process, and you'll be all right.



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