No. Personal ads belong in the alt.personals groups; there are even
groups for people with specific tastes (e.g. alt.personals.poly,
alt.personals.bondage, alt.personals.hamster.duct-tape). If you
want to post a request for pen-friends rather than a personal ad,
there's also soc.penpals which is dedicated for just that very
thing. Do not post personals in soc.singles, you will annoy the
readership and not get any positive responses.
Many, many web-based personals ads sites are available, both
free and pay services. Checking Yahoo
shows several hundred category matches if you search on
"personals"; so, you may wish to add some more search words
or just start browsing.
How about commercial ads?
They should also be avoided. Indeed, on the great majority of
newsgroups, any commercial advertising will be received with
hostility. The net is built on the voluntary cooperation of many
machines across the world, owned by businesses, governments, and
educational institutions, and because the owners generally don't
want to be paying for the distribution of competitors' advertising
and, in the case of educational and governmental machines, they may
have strict policies against carrying any advertising at all, one of
the basic premises of the net is a "gentleman's agreement" not to
post commercial messages outside of the groups specifically set
aside for that purpose (comp.newprod and biz.*). Even for pragmatic
reasons, it's best to avoid commercial messages, simply because you
generally don't want to kick off an advertising campaign by
irritating your potential customer base. For more details
concerning the commercial use of the net, you may wish to check out
the articles your system should have available in the group
news.announce.newusers.
What if my site doesn't carry alt.personals or soc.penpals?
Even if your site doesn't carry a given group, it's still possible
to post to it; fortunately, that's really all you need to be able to
do with a personal ad, since you would normally be getting responses
back in email anyway. A number of "mail-to-news gateways" exist
that will take email messages you send them and post them to any
Usenet group, whether it's on your system or not (and even if your
system only gives you mail capability and doesn't support news at
all).
If you have web access, you can read news and post from DejaNews
, which allows you more to search other
people's personal ads more easily than most newsreaders. If you
are using a newsreader / posting program that allows you to modify
your headers, many if not most will still let you post to a
newsgroup that your site doesn't carry; it may just ask you to
confirm that you really do want to post to the specified
newsgroup and haven't just mistyped it.
OK, if I'm not supposed to post personals, what kinds of articles
should I post?
Think of soc.singles as the electronic version of something that's
partway between a cocktail party and a soap opera. Appropriate
posts should be both interactive and entertaining--that is, their
content should both invite the participation of others in the
electronic conversation and be entertaining to its readers. You
might pose an open question to the readership about some aspect of
the human condition as it applies to singleness or you might reply
to another contributor's post and add an observation that sheds
light on a different aspect of the issue under discussion or just
makes some people out there laugh and shoot Pepsi out through their
noses onto their computer keyboards. Personal ads are a good
example of what sort of posting isn't appropriate because they are
neither of these--they aren't conducive to public discussion nor are
they entertaining.
Remember, the best way to get a positive response on any group is to
post something that will pique the interest of the other readers and
entertain them as well. On soc.singles, the best thing to do is
simply to post a message that expresses a stunningly profound
observation that is fundamental to the human condition as it relates
to singleness, one that is unobvious yet clarifies many of the more
confusing interactions between singles and MOTAS and is expressed
with succinctness, humor, an easy, flowing writing style, and--
perhaps most importantly--good spelling and the effective use of an
editor. Some days we'll just settle for someone who can spell and
use an editor. Then, wait for fan mail while composing your next
opus.
When in doubt, the best thing to do is read the newsgroup for a
while, at least until you get a feel for what's going on; as the
old saying goes, "lurk before you leap." (This is generally a good
approach for any newsgroup, not just soc.singles.) You may find it
easier to leap into a conversation in progress. Don't feel shy
about "butting in": one of the advantages of the net is that
everyone can get a word in without interrupting anyone else or being
thought rude for speaking up. Keep reading until you get to a
message that inspires an interesting comment or observation of your
own and put that in a followup message; or, if you're feeling really
brave, start a whole new thread and invite others' comments on a
subject that you think is interesting.
Don't forget who your audience is--people will be reading your
words all over the world with all kinds of software and on all
sorts of service providers. They might not have read an article
you're responding to, gone to the dance club down the street
from where you live, be using the same software you are, or know
what the message numbers are on your service provider (they're
different on every system); try to include enough information so
that a typical reader will understand what you're talking about
without feeling too confused.
Do I have to be single to post on soc.singles?
No. The only requirement is that you have been single at some time
in your life, know someone who was, or are interested in some of the
subjects that people meeting either of these conditions have been
known to talk about.
Soc.Singles isn't exclusively for singles or where non-single
people are unwelcome, but simply a place where it's normal to be single.
The rest of the world often feels like it's built around couples as the
basic social unit, leaving singles feeling awkward, left out, or like
a "third wheel." The basic "social unit" for soc.singles is the
individual, where you're not defined by whom you're with or any less
by not being with someone.
Just what does "single" mean anyway?
In the context of soc.singles, it means "unmarried"; there's a
tendency for "singles' issues" being discussed on soc.singles to be
directed towards people who don't currently have a long-term
committed partner, but anything interesting and/or important to
people who aren't married is appropriate.
What's the difference between soc.singles and soc.singles.moderated?
As the name suggests, soc.singles.moderated is a moderated group;
that means that your articles get sent off to the the "moderator" to
be approved before they appear. In this particular case, you just
have to invoke the secret password (which is revealed in the
soc.singles.moderated FAQ) and all your subsequent articles will
be approved automatically. This technique was taken to eliminate
hit-and-run advertising and flamebait from people who aren't
interested in taking the time to read the group and get rid of the
massive cross-posting that's usually used to create long-running,
pointless flamewars.
Many of the same people post to both groups or at least read them
both and will occasionally drop in a comment in the group they don't
participate in as much. It's also permitted to cross-post between
soc.singles and soc.singles.moderated, but most of the time it's not
appreciated and will tend to confuse soc.singles readers who haven't
gone through the approval process on soc.singles.moderated, because
their articles will get bounced back and not posted to either group.
Is there anything besides personal ads that should be avoided?
Of course there are other things that are best avoided--perhaps the
most important of these are emotional issues for which other
newsgroups have been created. Topics like abortion, politics,
religion, anything by Robert McElwaine, and other such things are
best avoided, not because they aren't valid issues, but because,
like personal ads, it's too easy for them to take over the newsgroup
and drive off those of us who participate on soc.singles because we
like soc.singles. Remember, anyone who wants to debate abortion can
go to talk.abortion and anyone who wants to post and read personals
can go to alt.personals*--but if soc.singles gets turned into
soc.talk.alt.personals.abortion.religion.politics.McElwaine, there's
no newsgroup where the soc.singlers can go to continue their
discussions.
It's also good form to avoid messages that are pretty much
content-free: don't, for example, quote an entire message that you
agree with and then append "Yeah, what she said" to the end. Test
messages should also be avoided--if you're unsure whether your
messages are getting out or not, post something to misc.test and
you'll get confirmation messages from various sites around the world
to let you know your posting software is working.
On soc.singles, like any other group, it's best to avoid the urge to
post spelling flames--if you catch a spelling error or a typo in
someone else's post, it does very little good to post a public
message about it, since the other readers will either have noticed
the error themselves--and don't need to be told about it--or they
won't care--in which case they don't need to be told about it. If
it's an informational post that's going to be reposted later or a
signature, you may want to inform the poster in e-mail, but unless
you can turn the spelling error into an outrageously witty
observation (e.g. the original poster has just made a screamingly
funny Freudian slip in print), there's no reason to post spelling
flames publicly.
If you get the urge to add to a pun chain, please don't quote all
the puns so far and then add a pun that already appears earlier in
the message. If you do think of a pun or other witty rejoinder to
add to someone else's article, it's a good idea to read any
followups that have already been posted before posting your witty
response, just to make sure that three or four people won't have
made the same remark already.
Finally, don't ever post chain letters, regardless of whether
they're disguised as plans to create "mailing lists" for big bucks
or not--posting such a message on soc.singles or any other newsgroup
is likely to get your account revoked. It's been remarked that the
"Make Money Fast" chain letters are one of the few crimminal
activities in which the perpetrator signs his name at the bottom; not
only does this make it easy to report the person posting the article
to his or her sysadmin (and getting the account in question revoked),
but the IRS does consider illegal income taxable and would probably
want to check up on whether the writer claiming to have received
hundreds of thousands of dollars in the mail has paid everything from
income tax to self-employment tax on that money. (In the unlikely
event that the writer actually has received that kind of money, there
may even be a reward to the person who brings this to the attention
of the IRS.)
Sometimes, soc.singles seems very intimidating--it's like everybody
knows everyone else and it's hard just to jump in to all the ongoing
conversations.
Remember that every poster on soc.singles had to post his or her first
message sometime and, even now, it's no more difficult for you to
press the followup-key than it is for anyone else. Sometimes it
helps just to read the newsgroup for a while--get a feel for what's
going on and what the other posters are like, what sorts of topics
have already been beaten to death many times over, and what sorts of
insights, knowlege, and experience you might have to add that others
might not think of. When you do decide to leap into the fray and
post something, don't be discouraged if it doesn't get a response
right away or even if it gets a negative response--after all, the
net is an imperfect medium and it's easy to be misunderstood, so
don't feel too bad if you sometimes don't get your ideas across in
quite the way you had intended. If you keep your cool and continue
participating, people will get to know you, you'll get to know them,
and misunderstandings will become less frequent.
What if I don't like any of the current discussions or just find them
all boring?
On the net, just like in real life, when you don't like something,
you're better off working constructively to change it instead of
just complaining about it. If you'd like to talk about something
else, then post a message about it and add enough of your thoughts
about it that the other contributors will have something to bite on.
Writing, "what do you think about single people who bring their pet
squids on dates?" is good, but "what do you think about single
people who bring their pet squids on dates? I was on a date last
week with someone who insisted in bringing 'Sigmund' the squid along
and taking pieces of food off my plate to feed to Sigmund without
asking first." is even better.
In general, the worst thing that you can do is post a message along
the lines of "this group sucks; I've read every single message on
this group every day for five years now and each one has been worse
than having my toenails ripped out using a badly misaligned electric
can opener." Remember that all the people posting to and reading
soc.singles are real people and tend to react rather like people
would if you were to walk into a party and sulk in the corner,
loudly shouting out "this party sucks" every few minutes while the
people all around you are busily having a good time. If the
messages aren't to your liking, either try to contribute positively
towards making the group more what you'd like it to be, use
killfiles more extensively, or locate another group that is more to
your liking. Just announcing your displeasure is unlikely to
motivate the other participants to post things that you'll want to
read, since obviously they must be enjoying the current tone and
content of soc.singles or they wouldn't be contributing to it.
I finally worked up the courage to post my first message and
nobody responded to it. Do you think that the soc.singlers are
conspiring to ignore me?
Alas, the contributors to soc.singlers are far too disorganized to
conspire against anyone. Most messages don't generate responses
anyway, otherwise the volume of soc.singles would be even greater
than it is. So, you may need to post a few messages before anyone
responds to something you've written. If you want to maximize your
chances of getting a response, try to make sure that your articles
contain room for others to respond--they should invite others to add
their thoughts to yours and, ideally, say something new and
different that will get the attention of your readers. Sometimes
messages can even be too good--they can simply cover the whole
subject and do it so authoritatively that there's nothing left for
anyone to say, so not getting a response to a message doesn't mean
that people aren't reading it or aren't interested by it.
Help! I just posted an article and got flamed horribly for it--
will I ever be able to show my face in public again?
Yep; just make sure you don't show it by posting a .gif of your
face to a non-binaries group. The truth is that most people flame
articles, not people--you could post two messages in one day and
have one flamed mercilessly and the other lauded with ASCII roses
by the same people. Just because someone flamed you for something
you said doesn't mean that the person in question hates you--the
best thing to do is just take it all in stride and keep on going.
In the event that you do find that you're getting flamed an awful
lot, you may wish to consider your presentation: even if you're
saying perfectly reasonable things, a lot of people will have
trouble with what you're saying if you 1) sound like you think you
speak for all humanity or 2) keep saying the same thing over and
over instead of listening to how people are responding to you and
responding yourself to what they say.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no requirement that one respond
to each and every flame directed one's way. Even if someone stoops
so low as to call you a "pompous spamhead" or impugns your ability to
make use of groceries that haven't been pre-chewed, you are still
free to ignore it and get on with your life; in fact, doing so is
often recommended, since people tend to skim a lot of messages and
running across a whole stream of articles arguing over whose head
bears the greatest resemblance to lunchmeat is a lot more likely to
leave the casual reader with the impression that you _are_ a pompous
spamhead than one or two ignored flames would have. Responding to
flames and personal attacks tends to focus attention on them, which
encourages those who flame you and is likely to make casual readers
see you in a worse light. So, when in doubt, ignore the flames and
respond to the articles that inspire you to say interesting and
thought-provoking things.
Hey--someone just posted a personal ad to soc.singles! Should I
flame the pants off this person?
That depends; if you can think of a wonderfully witty and
entertaining way to flame the ad, go ahead; otherwise it's not
generally worth the trouble of putting up a public post about it for
the whole world to read and it might be better just to send a note
to the poster in email suggesting that this is uncool. If you do
want to respond publicly, you might want to change the subject from
"lonely speedboat owner seeks fellow marmalade enthusiast" to
something more like "No Personals, Please (was: lonely speedboat
owner seeks...)"; that way people just scanning the topics or
reading the newsgroup with nn or other newsreaders that just show
you the subjects unless you select the article won't get the
impression from reading the headers that personals are the mainstay
of soc.singles--plus, those people who don't want to read the flames
generated by personals can just put "/No Personals, Please/:j" into
their killfiles.
Soc.singles is just full of flaming and angry-sounding people this
week; can't you guys all just get along?
Not everybody logs onto the net to meet people and enjoy friendly
conversations; a lot of people just enjoy being obnoxious and
feeling like they have a lot of power and are really cool if they
can piss other people off, especially if they can get someone else
to lose his or her cool and act like a twit too. Posting a message
saying that somebody like that is a rude and annoying twerp with no
social skills and probably has the personal hygiene normally
associated with week-old roadkill isn't going to make them
rethink their ways, it'll only encourage them.
On any newsgroup, if you don't like flaming and angry words, don't
add to them; what you write is part of the newsgroup just like
everybody else's articles, so the best way to make the newsgroup
have the style you enjoy is to post the kind of articles you'd like
to read if they'd been written by someone else.
Sometimes I write stuff that is just so incredible I think I should
crosspost it to every other newsgroup on the net. Is that OK?
No. In general on any newsgroup, crossposting should not be done
more than necessary. Inevitably, when you crosspost a discussion
about your taste in swimwear to soc.singles, alt.personals,
rec.scuba, rec.nude, and alt.culture.urdu, the thread will quickly
diverge in directions that most of the groups don't want to read
about. If you do this too often, people from the various groups
will start showing up at your house and tearing up your flowerbeds.
If you reply to a message that is crossposted, be sure to trim off
the newsgroups for which your reply is not appropriate or at the
very least set the Followup-To: field to the group for which the
subject matter is most appropriate.
Unfortunately, the net tends to attract people who can't get
attention or satisfaction in life except by cross-posting obnoxious
and self-important messages all over the place in hopes that someone
will pay attention to them. Usually it's not worth bothering to
reply to these sorts of articles; the original author probably
doesn't care what you say or have much interest in reading it,
but simply enjoys knowing that you were annoyed by it enough to
respond.
What is this "editing" stuff I keep hearing about?
"Editing," which is most commonly used in the phrase "please learn
how to edit your messages" refers to deleting unnecessary quoted
material. It's not at all unusual for newcomers to the net to reply
to long messages by quoting the entire thing and then responding to
a comment made somewhere in the middle of the original post by
adding a single sentence onto the end. It's much better to delete
quoted text from the original message if it isn't necessary to what
you're trying to say. Remember that many people out there, when
they see huge reams of quoted material that obviously hasn't been
edited down, will simply skip over to the next message without
bothering to read your sterling prose at the end, so a little
attention to the mechanisms of cleaning up quoted material will help
you get your points across. Also be sure to delete any quoted
material left at the end of your message--it's easy to respond to
something in the middle or even the beginning and forget to lop off
the quoted stuff at the end that you aren't responding to.
Don't be too industrious when deleting text, though--be sure to
leave enough quoted text so that the readers will know what you're
talking about even if they don't remember the message that you're
responding to and be careful not to trim off the attributions (the
names of the people saying the things you're quoting) that go with
the text you leave in. (Do feel encouraged to remove the names of
people whose comments have been entirely deleted, though.)
How about editing subject headers?
This is an important and much-neglected art. Often the topic will
have strayed far from its original one and a discussion on gerbil
rolfing will be carried out under the heading "Favorite skiing
lingerie." When this happens, it's entirely appropriate to change
the heading to something a little closer to the topic under
discussion. On the other hand, it's best not to change the topic
too often, especially when it's a hotly debated topic that is only
peripherally (if at all) involved with singledom and it is likely
that many people will be killing the topic (see the section on
killfiles later in this file) in an attempt to avoid reading about
it. Sometimes, when you do change the subject header, you may wish
to list what the previous topic was as well; for example, if the
topic being discussed under "Spiders vs. Lemon Pate'" had strayed to
an in-depth examination of the sexual habits of people with mohawks,
you might want to change the subject to "Mohawk Sex (was: Spiders
vs. Lemon Pate')" which would allow those who are following the
discussion under one heading to continue to follow it under the new
heading.
Even more important than occasionally changing the subject to match
the actual topic being discussed is eliminating inappropriate groups
when replying to a cross-posted article; no matter what newsgroup
you might be reading when you decide to respond to an article, if
you see more than one group listed in the "Newsgroups:" line of the
header, your article is going to appear in all of them, so make sure
that you delete any inappropriate groups from the list before
sending your article. There are enough people out there who
crosspost to a lot of groups maliciously, just to see how many
people they can irritate with a few keystrokes, that a lot of
readers don't have much patience left when it comes to articles
inappropriately crossposted to the newsgroups they read, so you can
make a lot of people pissed off at you by responding to a heavily
crossposted article without taking the time to trim off the groups
where your message doesn't really belong. Be warned, too, that
there's enough of a problem with crossposting that many readers
simply kill [don't read] articles that are crossposted to more than
a few groups or, sometimes, crossposted at all, so a lot of people
won't even see your article if you leave the extraneous groups in.
If you simply must reply to a heavily crossposted article and have
your article appear in all the groups the previous article was
posted to, you also have the option of listing just the relevant
groups in the "Followup-To:" line of the header; that way responses
to your article will show up just in the newsgroups you list and
you'll annoy fewer readers, since even if they think your article is
inappropriate for the group they're reading, at least you'll look
like you're making some effort to be considerate of other groups.
What else can I do to improve my ASCII appearance?
Any article posted to soc.singles will be read by many, many thousands
of people across the world who will be basing their impressions of you as a
person entirely on the messages you post, so it's worthwhile to make
sure your messages are clear and readable. Probably the single most
common mistake is not putting in carriage returns when they are
needed, either typing in an entire paragraph or message in a single
line (which looks sloppy, is difficult to quote properly, and may be
truncated by some offline readers) or only putting in a return after
more than 80 columns (which looks even worse, since on most systems this will
show up as alternating full lines and really short lines). Most of
the time, it's best to limit your lines to no more than 72 columns,
which leaves enough extra space that they will still be easily
readable even when quoted a time or two. Even if your system can
handle reformatting messages so they look nice anyway, remember that
most systems don't do this and, if you aren't careful with inserting
carriage returns, your messages will be harder to read by others.
Other obvious elements like correct spelling, punctuation, and
grammar help make your message more readable too (and will make you
all the more likely to generate positive responses rather than
grammar flames). Another thing to avoid is typing in your messages
in all-caps (LIKE THIS) which makes it seem like you're shouting--plus it
makes it less likely that you'll be taken seriously, since the percentage
of words in all-caps in a message has been linked in several studies to
the psychoceramicity (crackpottedness) of the author.
If you're replying to someone else's article, it helps to quote at
least some of what the other article says, just so people have a
better idea of what you're talking about. Delete any unnecessary
quoted material, but leave in the attributions (the list of who said
what) of any text that you do leave in. If you want to refer to
another article explicitly, it's best to mention the message-ID of
the article in question--don't tell your readers the number of the
article on your system, because article numbers will be different on
every system.
What do these weird combinations of punctuation marks I see
frequently in people's messages mean?
These are called "smileys" since the most common ones used are
little pictograms representing a smiling face: ":-)". Because the
net is inherently a text medium, it lacks many of the nuances of
ordinary face-to-face conversation like facial expressions and tone
of voice, so people try to make up for them in various ways, the
most popular being the "smiley."
Standard smileys include:
:-) :) smile 8-) B-) smile w/ glasses
;-) wink :-> ironic/lecherous smile
:-( sad/unhappy :-O surprise
There's an ongoing debate as to whether smileys are a good thing or
a bad thing; some people like to use them whenever possible, others
feel that writing should stand on its own without having to point
out whether something was supposed to be funny or not.
You'll also note unrepentant programmer types adding variants of C
compiler directives to their posts or use parodies of HTML tags to
clue you in on the deep, inner feelings that lurk beneath the
facade of their words. For example:
#dripping_sarcasm_mode(ON)
and
<VOICE="Bela Lugosi">Good Eeevening</VOICE>
In general, it should be pretty obvious even to the non-programmer
what the writer means to convey with these directives.
How do you pronounce "soc"?
There's no currently accepted standard. The currently most popular
pronunciations are "soak," "sosh" (like in 'social'), "sock," and
"soas" (as in "sociological"). The least popular pronunciations
include "sach," "sick," and "throat-warbler mangrove." The IEEE and
CCITT are jointly working on developing an international standard
for the pronunciation of "soc" and expect that the first draft of
the standard will be available some time near the end of the
third quarter of 2011.
What's a ".GIF", ".JPG" or ".MPG"?
GIF stands for "Graphics Interchange Format" and is a common format
in which pictures are stored for display on a computer screen; when
someone on soc.singles mentions something that someone else would
really like to have seen, the latter person may jokingly ask for a
"GIF"--but even if you're asked for one, don't even think of posting
it to soc.singles, since they tend to be huge and are expressly
forbidden on non-binaries groups. The same goes for .JPG or JPEG
(another popular graphics format) and .MPG, MPEG, or .AVI (graphics
formats for computer-displayed "movies.")
Is there a World-Wide Web page for soc.singles?
Yes. Trygve Lode (soc.singles faq maintainer and lunatic) maintains
a soc.singles homepage at
http://www.trygve.com/singles.html
which is slowly being expanded as people give me suggestions
for what they'd like to see there.
Ross ridge maintains a soc.singles page at
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/rridge/ss/soc-singles.html
Additionally, homepages for the Dallas Poker Mini-Boink and the
DenverBoink are available at
http://www.swcp.com/~russo/DPMB.html
http://www.swcp.com/~russo/denverboink/DB.html
(courtesy of Thomas Russo; note that "DPMB" is in all-caps)
If you're not familiar with the World-Wide Web, but would like
to be, you may wish to check out the WWW FAQ on news.answers or
ftp it from rtfm (/pub/usenet/news.answers/www/faq/part1 and part2).
What, exactly, are "Disney Chemicals"?
"Disney Chemicals" refers to the hypothesized fizzy brain chemicals
that can cause a person to believe in "happily ever afters," the
impending appearance of the prince/princess of one's dreams on one's
doorstep, and an eternity of true love and blissful togetherness.
How do you pronounce "Trygve"
It's sorta like "TREEG-vah" except that the 'EE' is between a long e
and a short i.
How come nice guys don't get laid?
Nice guys do get laid; it's guys who whine a lot who generally don't.
How come nice guys/gals/small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri
get dumped for jerks/bimbos/hyperfungal Rigellian psuedoshoggoths?
Mostly for the same reasons jerks get dumped for nice guys, bimbos
get dumped for other bimbos, and hyperfungal Rigellian
pseudoshoggoths get rejected in favor of lesser Altairian
shaggy-toothed carno-weeds. No matter how much more keenly you feel
it when it happens to you than when it happens to someone else, the
fact of the matter is that getting dumped/rejected/passed over in
favor of others happens to pretty much everybody, no matter how nice
or mean they happen to be. Remember, too, that your perception of
someone you've just been dumped for is unlikely to match that of
the person who just dumped you: most people tend to view their
rivals through a jaundiced eye to begin with; your dumper's tastes,
turn-ons, and values are rarely quite the same as yours; and it's
likely that your rival will feel jealous of _you_, which tends to
get in the way of your rival showing you his or her best side. It's
also worth noting that the person who dumped you may be trying to
make you feel better by emphasizing your rival's bad qualities and
failing to mention the good ones, figuring that bubbling over about
his or her wonderful new partner would only make you feel worse.
No matter why you've been dumped or whom you've been dumped for, the
best advice is generally the same: take it in stride and get on
with your life. There's always tomorrow and very few people have
ever found love and happiness by pining away and moping.
I met someone last week at a party; what do you think this person's
deepest and innermost feelings for me are?
That's one of the most common questions new people ask on
soc.singles and, unfortunately, one of the most difficult ones to
answer in any meaningful way. Trouble is, all people are different
and what would mean something for one person is likely to mean
something completely different for someone else--and if you have
trouble figuring out someone you know and have first-hand experience
with, imagine how difficult it can be for people who have never met
this person and are dealing only with second-hand information to
figure out what's on that person's mind. That doesn't mean you
can't ask the other readers of soc.singles what they think, but it
does mean that you shouldn't take any advice you get too seriously
or think of it as a substitute for actually talking to the person
you're curious about.
Is it possible for men and women to be just friends?
Yes; many people have friends of the opposite sex without ever
having any sort of sexual relationship with them. This, of course,
doesn't imply anything one way or the other as to whether you or
any other given individual can really be "just friends" with a
member of the opposite sex.
Do conversations on the net ever blossom into torrid romances?
Yes; it's actually not even particularly unusual. Conversations over
the net have the advantage of being a non-threatening way to get to
know someone and, sometimes, if a person has managed to interest you
through articles and/or e-mail and this person continues to interest
you when you meet for real, well, all sorts of interesting things
have been known to happen. However, this doesn't mean that simply by
posting (even if you post an awful lot) you'll meet your dream mate;
indeed, if it's obvious that you're posting for this reason, you'll
tend to turn off most of the people who might otherwise be
interested. So, basically, if you're open to finding a mate this
way, the best thing to do is just to hang out and have a good time
and if it happens, it happens--and if it doesn't, you'll at least
have had a good time. (Strangely enough, there are even some folks
who recommend this approach to mate-finding for real life as well.)
What about personal ads?
Don't post them on soc.singles.
Will this message ever end?
Well, it always has before.
How about posting articles asking for readers to send postcards to
a kid in England who is dying of cancer and wants to set the world
record for most cards received before he dies?
No, don't do it. He's been cured, has asked many times for people
to stop sending him cards, and thoroughly regrets ever having had
the idea in the first place. The "Neiman Marcus $250 Cookie Recipe"
story and the "Good Times Virus" are also well-known urban legends;
if you want to read about them or, for some reason, write about
them, the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban is devoted just to that
subject. Two other good places to dig up the details on these and
other urban legends are the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's
Urban Legend Reference Pages ( http://www.snopes.com )
and the
alt.folklore.urban archives ( http://www.urbanlegends.com )
.
How come there are so many kooks on the net?
In a word, attention. It's an unfortunate fact of life that a turd
in an art gallery gets a lot more attention than yet another Picasso.
Getting people across the world to tell you that you're a disgusting
twit seems like a strange thing to get turned on by, but obviously
enough people out there derive sufficient enjoyment and satisfaction from
it to keep the net well-stocked with fertilizer. Most net.kooks
quickly find a few stock tactics that are sure to annoy enough
people into responding that they can just sit back and repost the
same stuff year after year and bask in all the attention it gets
them with practically no effort on their part. Arguing with a net
kook only provides further encouragement--if you want to keep all
the Picassos from being replaced by wall-to-wall turds, the only
effective approach is to ignore them until they go off in search of
other people still naive enough to play the Pay-Attention-To-Meeee game.
OK, we're getting near the end of the file now--what's this about
"killfiles" that you promised to tell us about?
Most newsreaders have a provision for "killing" messages; that is,
marking them as read before you get to them, so your newsreader then
skips over them automatically instead of showing them to you. I'm
going to discuss how to do this in rn and its derivatives (trn, etc.)
but most other newsreaders should have similar capabilities (though
the command syntax won't necessarily be identical). Topics are the
easiest things to kill, as you need only type the 'k' key and all
subsequent messages with that topic will be marked as read; you can
also kill things in more complex ways by typing in a "regular
expression" followed by ":j", telling the newsreader to "junk"
(mark as read) all the articles that match that regular expression.
Remember, you still can read the messages that have been marked as
read if you want to, either by typing in the message number or by
using the 'N' and 'P' commands to move to the next and previous
messages rather than the 'n' and 'p' commands.
A regular expression normally consists of a pair of '/'s with a
pattern you'd like to match in the middle. For example, if you
wanted to kill all messages whose topics included the word "banana"
you could type in "/banana/:j" and hit a return (and it would list
the numbers of the articles that were being junked--the topics
"BananaSizeWar" and "vegemite and banana delight; mmmm-mmm" would
be junked. The default is to check just the topic line and not
differentiate between upper- and lower-case letters; that is, it
wouldn't matter whether the topic had the word "banana" or "bAnAnA"
in it. If you want it to be case sensitive and select "bAnAnA" but
not "Banana", a 'c' should be placed after the trailing slash:
"/bAnAnA/c:j". You can also have your newsreader check more than
just the topic line--adding an 'h' after the trailing slash makes
the newsreader check the entire header (allowing you to kill
messages by a given author and/or from a particular site) and adding
an 'a' will check the whole article; thus, "/grunting/a:j" would
mark every article containing the word "grunting" as read. (And,
of course, this may be combined with the 'c' option so that
"/Grunting/ca:j" would kill off only those articles in which
"Grunting" is capitalized.)
You can also type in an expression like this without the ":j" at the
end, in which case it will simply locate and display the article
that matches the pattern. Using question marks ("?") instead of
slashes will make it search backwards instead of forwards and the
"r" option makes it scan articles that you've already read. Thus,
if you were trying to find the article in which somebody mentioned
something about the use of badger dung as an aphrodesiac, you could
type in "?badger dung?ar" for it to search all preceding articles
for a mention of badger dung; if you want it to mark all the
articles that mention badger dung as unread, you can type in
"?badger dung?ar:m"
Kill commands like those above may be placed in a file where they
will be performed automatically when you read a group. This file
goes in a directory off your News directory corresponding to the
group name and the default name for this file is KILL (note
capitals). Thus, the killfile for soc.singles would be
[your home directory]/News/soc/singles/KILL
Hitting a 'K' will not only kill the topic you're reading, but also
add a command to kill that topic in future sessions to your killfile
for that group, creating it if it doesn't exist, even creating the
directories to put it in if necessary. While this is the easiest
way to add to a killfile, it is also generally the least useful,
since most topics do die or change after a while, but unless you
edit that line out of your killfile, it will continue to live in
there, eating up processor time and generally slowing everything
down whenever you read that group. In general, keeping your
killfiles to a minimum is a good approach, especially if you are
sharing a computer with other users who don't like the system
bogging down any more than you do.
A few examples:
-
killing messages from beavis@butthead.edu:
-
/^From: *beavis@butthead\.edu/h:j
-
killing messages cross-posted from alt.boring.prattle:
-
/^Newsgroups:.*alt\.boring\.prattle/h:j
-
killing messages crossposted to three or more groups:
-
/^Newsgroups:.*,.*,/h:j
-
killing all messages that even mention hairballs:
-
/hairballs/a:j
You'll notice that I used a few strange characters up there: these
are characters that have special meaning when used in an expression
like one of these: '^' indicates the beginning of a line so that
the first example will only consider lines that begin with "from:";
'.' is a single-character wildcard that will match any character
(that's why when we really want a '.', we have to precede it with a
'\' as we've done in the above examples); and '*' means that the
pattern should match an arbitrary number of characters matching the
character immediately before it in the expression (in the first
example, you can see that we use it to allow there to be an
arbitrary number of spaces between "From:" and "beavis" and in the
second example, we've used it after the '.' wildcard so that there
can be an arbitrary number of characters of any kind between
"Newsgroups:" and "alt"). More about regular expressions and
killfiles can be found by typing "man rn" and "man ed" at your
Unix prompt.
Is there any copyright on this FAQ?
Yep; the entire contents of this FAQ is written and maintained by
Trygve Lode (tlode@nyx.net)
and is (c) Copyright 2000. Feel
free to copy, transmit, and distribute this FAQ in unmodified form
for any not-for-profit use in any medium you desire (electronic,
print, interpretive dance, etc.). If you wish to include all or
part of the FAQ in any for-profit publication or in connection with
any for-profit service or wish to distribute a modified version of
the FAQ for any purpose, get ahold of me for any necessary
arrangements. (Even if you're going to distribute it for non-profit
use, you may wish to get ahold of me anyway, just to make sure you
have the most up-to-date version available.)
Are you sure I can't post personals on soc.singles?
Yes, completely sure. Don't even think about it.
