Help on Posting to ABPC

General Guidelines

• Please include a description of your post, either on the subject line or in an accompanying text file. Alternately, many posters of series will include an index of thumbnails. If appropriate, you may wish to identify the age range and gender of the subjects in the images. Following these guidelines will help others select favorite images to download, without having to grab every single post.
  
• For multi-part posts, be sure to number each section appropriately (1/4, 2/4, etc.). Most newsreaders have settings to do this automatically.In general multi-part posting is discouraged because many newsreaders cannot automatically decode these kinds of posts.
  
• If you are not sure of what to put on the subject line, or other questions of "style," lurk for awhile and see what others do. It should be clear after a short time what seems to be the norm for the group.
  
• If you are new to posting images, please practice first by posting to the universal group, "alt.test". Be sure to put the word "ignore" in your subject line. If you don't, some automatic programs throughout the world will send you acknowledgement of your post to alt.test (this is a trouble- shooting "service" provided by some public ISPs). If you're lonely and want to fill your mailbox with automated responses, try posting something to alt.test without the "ignore" in the subject. :-)
  

Posting Techniques

Encoding

When posting to the Usenet, images must first be converted from 8-bit binary files to 7-bit ASCII files. Luckily, all newsreaders will automatically do this conversion. However, there are several choices/decisions you must make before posting.

Type of encoding to use

The de-facto standard technique for posting is using UUencoding. Mime/base-64 is another common technique that is becoming more popular. I won't contribute to the fight going on in some circles as to which is better to use, but for greatest compatibility with the most people, I would guess that UUencoding is still the way to go.

Unfortunately, there are a few newsreaders out there that *default* to Mime encoding, so unless you change this, you will post in Mime without knowing it. Each program is different, so read the help files and check the menus to find the switches to change.In particular, if you use web-browsers such as Netscape or Internet Explorer for usenet, you may be forced to use Mime.

Number of lines

Another decision that must be made concerns the number of lines to post. If you look around the binary groups, you will notice that some posters will post images in one piece, while others will post in several parts (e.g. 1/3, 2/3, 3/3). In the early days of the Internet (and to a more limited extent, still today), some servers had/have a size limit on posted articles. To get around this limit, posters would break up the files into pieces. Nowadays, most servers do not have size limits, or the limit is over 1M, so for 99% of images, these limits do not apply.

However, as with encoding, some newsreader programs default to limiting the size of encoded files. They show the limit in the form of "number of lines" to encode to. Since each line is approximately 62 characters, a 1000 line post is approximately 65K in size (including headers). Unless you *know* your own service provider limits the file size of usenet posts, you should change the settings on your program to post unlimited size, or post in one piece/file. Note that when you encode a binary in any format (MIME, UU), you increase the file size by about 30%. That is, a 100M picture will encode to about 130M.

Unfortunately, the internet as it is currently structured, will lose occasional posts. If an image is in four parts, only one part needs to be lost for the entire image to be lost. Posting images in one piece will increase the odds of proper distribution.