Filk FAQ Problems posting to rmf

Whyforhowcome My RMF Posts are Coming out Wierd?

(See also "The Obvious Tune" and Other Faux Pas for problems of a less technical nature)
Last update January 13, 2009

Buglist. My thanks to Rich Brown for questions (and answers) one and two. Anybody got others to share?

Why do others complain about 'high-ASCII' in my posts?
Usenet standards only support plain old ASCII; old-timers in the group will happily tell you so. Several participants in rec.music.filk use (gasp!) computers that aren't running any flavor of Windows. These computers may display extensions to ASCII as characters different from the ones you see. Writing a filk in MS Word and cut-and-pasting into your newsreader may result in many such non-ASCII characters ... curly quotes, em-dashes, and the like. Cut-and-paste into Notepad first to eliminate these characters. Non-ASCII characters in posts may be called '8-bit ASCII', 'high ASCII', or (by those who are somewhat less charitable) 'Microsoft ASCII'

Usenet standards only support plain old ASCII; old-timers in the group will happily tell you so.
Several participants in rec.music.filk use (gasp!) computers that aren't running *any* flavor of Windows. These computers may display extensions to ASCII as characters different from the ones *you* see.
Writing a filk in MS Word and cut-and-pasting into your newsreader may result in many such non-ASCII characters ... curly quotes, em-dashes, and the like. Cut-and-paste into Notepad first to eliminate these characters.
Non-ASCII characters in posts may be called '8-bit ASCII', 'high ASCII', or (by those who are somewhat less charitable) 'Microsoft ASCII'

Why don't I see all the messages in rec.music.filk?
Usenet doesn't guarantee delivery of any given post to all computers; even the best ISP may miss some messages. Usenet is a low priorty at many ISPs; some of them aren't very good at it. If you read rec.music.filk thru Google Groups you should be aware that some filkers include X-No-Archive: yes in their message headers. This means (as you might expect) that their posts are not to be archived. Google honors this and does not include such messages in its database.

Usenet doesn't guarantee delivery of any given post to all computers; even the best ISP may miss some messages.
Usenet is a low priorty at many ISPs; some of them aren't very good at it.
If you read rec.music.filk thru Google Groups you should be aware that some filkers include X-No-Archive: yes in their message headers. This means (as you might expect) that their posts are not to be archived. Google honors this and does not include such messages in its database.