Subject: Where to put test postings

17. *****
 Q: Where to put test postings?

 A: Let me try to give hopefully helpful information about how best
go about making test postings. Please don't take offense by this
item. It is solely meant as friendly guidance so that you can better
find your way on the net.
   Novice users, and sometimes even others, occasionally place these
"A test, please ignore" messages in discussion newsgroups. Please
don't do this. It is wasteful of the resources. These news reach
tens of thousands of readers, so a very wide distribution is
involved. Furthermore, many users find the test messages very
annoying in the discussion newsgroups, and you have a good chance of
getting some testy email.
   There is a much better solution for the testing. There are
special test newsgroups just for this purpose, such as alt.test and
misc.test. The misc.test is a good option, since there are several
test echoes along the feed. They will automatically send you
email acknowledgements when your test posting reaches these sites.
   If you just wish to test posting without the automatic
acknowledgments to clutter your mailbox, check if your site has a
newsgroup simply called test. Thus don't necessarily start with a
newsgroup with a "world" distribution right away. First consider
experimenting with a "local" newsgroup, and think of expanding only
after that, if this still is necessary. If you look at the header of
a Usenet posting, you'll notice that it includes the a line for
distribution. Don't trust it. The distribution limitation is not
guaranteed to work. In global newsgroups a local distribution can
easily "leak" since not all configurations along the feed observe
this feature. Thus the distribution field in the header is best left
unchanged.
   Another method. If you want to suppress the autoresponders along
the feed, include the word "ignore" in the "Subject:" header of our
articles posted to *.test.
   Additional information to neophyte news users from Jim Wamsley
wamsley@dcsun1.stortek.com. "When testing your ability to post to
newsgroups, test first to your local.test newsgroup. This posting
should appear only on your news server. When you are satisfied that
you are comfortable with postings, you can try some of the many test
news groups on the network, such as alt.test and misc.test. However,
do not include local.test in these postings. When you include
local.test and another newsgroup, not only is your article posted on
*.test and your local.test, but in every other local.test on every
news server in the world. This tends to upset news administrators
and on occasion has them chasing a problem that really doesn't
exist."
   If you are a news or a system manager who has had to do the test
this way for practical reasons, my apologies if this advisory note
was not appropriate in the case of your test. This was only meant as
benevolent advice in case you were not aware of these alternatives.
On the other hand, a responsible and knowledgeable system manager
could, of course, indicate why the global test posting was necessary
in the first place and cancel the test posting as soon as it is no
longer necessary to circulate it to the tens of thousands of Usenet
readers subscribing to the discussion newsgroups.
   News administrators might also be interested in the newsgroup
misc.test.moderated run by Ian Phillipps. An extract from its
charter: "The group misc.test.moderated complements misc.test, by
providing a way for news administrators to test the mechanism for
posting to moderated groups."

  A2: Here is a very important little tip when you have made your
test posting in the proper newsgroup. Take a careful look at the
"From:" header of your test posting. Your full email address should
appear in there, like mine would show up (without the quotes) as
"From: ts@poiju.uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi)" If not, you have a serious
problem, since other users will not be able to reply to your
postings by email. In that case contact your own site's newsmaster
a.s.a.p. alerting him/her to the problem.
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