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sbay.forsale charter sbay.forsale is for posting items wanted or for sale in the South Bay Area. Acceptable topics for sbay.forsale include offers of sale/barter/giveaway of goods/services notices of auction desire to purchase/barter goods/services Articles posted in sbay.forsale should be one-time announcements, not recurring advertisements. Recurring ads should be on web pages - then make a one-time announcement about the location of the page. However, it is OK to post an article about the same item up to once a month while it remains unsold, as long as the re-posting is temporary. Articles for the same item should be posted no more often than every 4 weeks because local news sites tend to keep local news articles longer than mainstream (and higher-traffic) UseNet groups. (Also, readers have good memories and don't want to see the same article repeated.) Articles and the items they discuss must have a direct tie to the South Bay Area. In particular, this requires that the item is relatively immobile/unshippable (couches, cars, grand pianos), located exclusively in the South Bay area (apartments, real estate), of particular interest to area residents (Books such as "Guide to to South Bay Restaurants"), the buyer/seller does not want to deal with shipping out of area (perhaps the seller/buyer prefers dealing face-to-face), or for anything else, it must be for sale from and to the South Bay Area or vicinity. If the item does not meet these requirements, it does not matter if the poster thinks that people in the South Bay Area might be interested. One person posting from outside the area may not see how their article adds up, but the non-local articles did add up to make this policy necessary. [Credit to the dc.* coordinators for many of the above ideas. Thanks!] The term "South Bay" for purposes of the sbay.* newsgroups refers to Santa Clara County and vicinity in Northern/Central California, internationally known as Silicon Valley. The name "South Bay" comes from the area's position in the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area. For the Newsgroups file: sbay.forsale Items for sale in the South Bay (local articles only).

The rest of the charter is the same for all sbay.* newsgroups. South Bay residents should include the entire charter when complaining to posters about charter violations.

An article is considered local to the sbay newsgroups if it has something specific to Santa Clara County, California. Santa Cruz County is also accepted as local. Due to Silicon Valley's recently expanded role in the economy, other adjacent counties are accepted too: San Mateo, Alameda and San Benito Counties. With exceptions for net abuse listed below, there is no enforcement for being "non-local" if the article is posted from Northern or Central California, as defined by counties north of and including Monterey, Fresno and Mono Counties up to the Oregon border. However, all posters are still requested to respect the intended scope of these forums as being for and about the South Bay Area.

If you post in the sbay newsgroups from outside Northern and Central California, your article may be cancelled by the sbay newsgroup coordinators. (If you dislike this, you can blame all the spammers' abuses since 1994.) However, if you inadvertently responded to a cross-posted article which you saw in another non-sbay newsgroup, the sbay newsgroup coordinators will not pursue the matter as a case of abuse. You are responsible for where you post so remember to check the Newsgroups header when replying. Try to avoid repeating the error.

Note that most Internet Service Providers and Backbone Providers have an "Acceptable Use Policy" requiring compliance with charters for all newsgroups that have them. You could lose your Internet access for deliberate violations of this or other UseNet newsgroup charters.

• excessively cross-posted articles (one article posted to too many newsgroups at once)
• excessively multiple-posted articles (copies of the same article posted lots of times in different newsgroups)
• articles cross-posted to other regional newsgroups outside Northern and Central California

The following types of net abuse are severe wastes of bandwidth. This charter authorizes any sufficiently-experienced member of the sbay.* community to cancel any of these abuses on sight.

• "Make Money Fast" (MMF) chain letters and pyramid/Ponzi schemes. Such schemes are Federal and California State felonies. On UseNet, promoting waste of bandwidth is the equivalent of a crime because the system would break down if such acitivty was left unchecked.
• binaries such as uuencoding or MIME base 64 (there are no binary newsgroups in the sbay.* hierarchy)
• "spew", or reposted old articles with new message IDs, can happen when a poorly administered site restores a backup of a news spool (never back up a news spool) or a misconfigured gateway to another network re-introduces on UseNet articles which originated there.