What Is the USENET Death Penalty?

Contrary to what some spammers might think, online communication is a world where you can be held responsible for what you do. The USENET Death Penalty is the most severe penalty that any user of this newsgroup can face, just as the name implies.

Spammers are huge problems for just about every network form of communication currently in use. Even though the spammers are the heart of the problem, they are not the only problem. In fact, without ISPs that have sloppy policies regarding filtering out spammers, the spammers would not be able to do what they do. It is an example of people fighting back against the spammers that make networked communications miserable sometimes.

How it Works

If you were an ISP or an individual user that posted spam on newsgroups regularly, you would be contacted by the moderators of the groups and, eventually, by the server administrators. In fact, they would contact you several times to ask you to remedy the problem and to cease and desist posting spam on any of the USENET newsgroups that the server hosted. At a certain point, the administrators of the servers and the moderators of the newsgroups would get fed up. If they didn't hear from you and if the problem persisted, they would pursue the USE-NET Death Penalty as a remedy.

If somebody is served the USENET Death Penalty, there are basically three ways that it can happen. The most severe incarnation of the USE-NET Penalty is called an Active USENET Death Penalty. In this instance, anything posted by the ISP or the offending individual will be automatically canceled. A passive USE-NET Death Penalty is not quite as severe. The posts made by the offending ISP or individual will not be canceled but they will not be propagated further along the system, either. If you get served with a partial, it means that certain newsgroups will no longer allow you to post on them but that you will still be able to use the USENET system.

Is this Arbitrary?

Enforcing a USENET Death Penalty on an ISP or user is neither arbitrary nor selective in terms of the size of the organizations threatened with them. Some of the largest ISPs in the world have been threatened with the USE-NET Death Penalty, including America Online and CompuServe. These ISPs were found to be the sources of a flood of spam newsgroup postings and, because of that, the USENET system threatened them with being completely excluded from the system.

Even though it doesn't sound as severe as the other two incarnations of the USENET Death Penalty, you need to take any notice that you are about to be served with a partial USE-NET Penalty very seriously. If somebody intends to ban you from a newsgroup, it's unlikely that you'll ever be allowed back into it if you don't take any action. Be reasonable and listen to the complaints that you are receiving. In some cases, you may not even realize that you are spamming a newsgroup and, if this is the case, most moderators are very reasonable, as long as you talk to them about the issue.