sbay.transportation charter

sbay.transportation is for topics related to transportation in the South Bay. This specifically includes discussion of local transit, road, bicycle, pedestrian and air transportation issues. This also includes issues related to commutes or travel to the South Bay from the surrounding regions of Northern and Central California.

There is also a ba.transportation newsgroup which covers regional transportation issues and discussion about the San Francisco Bay Area. As a rule of thumb, transportation issues which have one or both endpoints of the trip within Santa Clara County are appropriate for discussion in sbay.transportation. Issues with an endpoint of the trip outside Santa Clara County but within the 9-county "Bay Area" may be cross-posted to ba.transportation, or pick just one of the two that seems closest to your topic. Some topics, such as rail transit planning and construction, are of interest to the region as a whole and should be cross-posted to ba.transportation.

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.transportation Transit, road, bicycle, pedestrian and air transportation in the South Bay.

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.

This newsgroup is unmoderated for residents of the South Bay Area and vicinity. However, some articles do not qualify as local even if posted from the South Bay Area if they are forms of net abuse. The exceptions are

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 newsgroup is retro-moderated for non-local articles, as defined in the sbay.* newsgroup policies. The policies are posted separately on sbay.general and on WWW at http://www.sbay.org/. This charter permits the sbay.* newsgroup coordinators to cancel any article which is not at least partly specific to the South Bay Area or violates a newsgroup charter in any other way. Any member of the sbay.* community may send e-mail to the poster and/or their site's news admins for sbay.* charter violations. Requests for cancels should be sent to the SBAY CancelCritter contact address at critter@sbay.org.

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.

Any article cancellations under this charter only apply to articles posted or cross-posted in this newsgroup. Cancel controls must state a reason for cancellation and provide a non-anonymous address to contact the poster of the cancel. It is also recommended to send e-mail to the poster and/or their site's news admins.