jester wrote the following in the original FAQ. I assume that this information will still be relevant for some USENET members... This being the FAQ for the group, it is natural that postings to it should find a place here. Usenet poses some difficulties concerning the transmission of binary data, as mods are. Only 7-bit ASCII is transmitted, while binaries are 8-bit files. This means that mods need to be encoded before they can be posted to Usenet. There are several encoding methods, the most common being uuencoding. Others include MIME, XX and a few others, but these are not recommended (you want as many people as possible to hear your creations, don't you?). Don't even attempt to post a binary to usenet without having encoded it to ASCII. Use of encoding methods other than uuencoding is strongly discouraged. Uuencoding is the de-facto Usenet standard and tools exist to deal with it on virtually all platforms, while other standards, while perhaps being better in some respects, are bound to cause problems for a lot of users. Another problem is that some news servers don't read more than a certain amount of lines in usenet postings. This is why most posts are split into 'small' chunks. A maximum of 1000 lines seems sensible (this is roughly 64 KBytes). It is considered good netiquette and STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to supply a part zero of howevermany including a description of the posted file. I hereby declare the following as the FAQ-standard part zero for a.b.s.mods: - example cut here - - - - - - - - - - - FILE NAME: example.mod SONG NAME: The exemplary Song ARCHIVE: PkZip 2.04g MOD TYPE: 8CHN COMPOSER: Nobody METHOD: Original MUSICAL STYLE: ambient deep techno house POSTER: Nobody too <nobody@nothing.not> UPLOADED TO: ftp.cdrom.com/pub/demos/music/incoming/example.zip COMMENTS: This is just an example - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -cut here- Explanation of the above:
Use subject lines that include the filename of your posting and the part number, the latter either in brackets (recommended) or in the form "part x of y". If you feel like it, put a very short description in the subject line. However, if you follow this guideline, a subject line saying simply "EXAMPLE.abc (x/y)" should suffice. The above example would have the following subjects, assuming that the uuencoded data took four parts: Subject: EXAMPLE.MOD (0/4) Subject: EXAMPLE.MOD (1/4) Subject: EXAMPLE.MOD (2/4) Subject: EXAMPLE.MOD (3/4) Subject: EXAMPLE.MOD (4/4) Although a lot of ISPs still have the kinds of limits jester describes, most posts onto absm are in one large zipfile, and have been for a couple of years now. Usually, it's a two part message ie 00/01 where 01 is the zipfile and 00 is the comments page jester mentions. I tend to agree with the general efficiency of this method because there was nothing more frustrating than trying to tie a MOD together that came in 12 parts!! The last time I saw a multi-part posting was about a year and a half ago, and the poster got roundly flamed for doing so! However, if that is your only method of uploading, I'm sure if you explain it in a text introduction, most newsgroup regulars would cut you some slack. However, most ISPs do have larger Usenet feeds these days so it's not unusual to see a 1.7MB MOD in one part, in fact its become a de facto standard almost everywhere.
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