MOD: Business Newsgroup Policies

INTRODUCTION
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The newsgroups misc.business.marketing.moderated, misc.business.moderated,
misc.business.consulting, and misc.entrepreneurs.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.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.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.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.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/p...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.