Well known tags and their usage

Often the most important part of a post is the subject line. It tells you whether this post is interesting for you or not. Unfortunately it's nearly completely impossible for a human being to scan for interesting posts in a Newsgroup with more than 800 posts a day. An easy way out of this problem are tags.

Tags are little standardized markers, placed into the subject line, that people can use for writing filters. That way you can either filter out undesired posts (which will then not be displayed and downloaded) or you can filter for interesting posts (meaning everything will not be displayed and downloaded except those posts).

Every tag is used on its own. If you need more than one tag, simply use more than one tag, but don't combine different tags in an attempt to create a new one. If your post is off-topic and a fanfic, put "[FA][FANFIC]" into the subject line. Thanks to tags, people who don't want to read your posts won't get bothered and those who want to read your posts won't accidentally miss them.

A typical example for tag usage

Let me start with a simple hypothetical situation:
You subscribed to 100 NGs about topics that you like and every NGs has an average of 40 posts a day (some have over 100 a day, others never more than 5), you get confronted with 4000 messages a day.

Let us further assume that you will only read 5% of those messages completely (you will look at the other 95%, but not read their content) and that takes you 5 minutes for every message you read (you should be a fast reader, since some messages are quite long) and 10 seconds for taking a look at every other message (only to recognize that you are not interested in it).

Summing all up means you had to spent 27 hours a day for your Usenet activities, what is a problem on a 24h day, isn't it ^.^;

That's what a subject is good for. It makes it easier for people to see if the post may be interesting or just a waste of time. So you should always use accurate subject lines. The problem is that the longer you make the tag line, the longer it takes to read it, but it isn't always possible to say what you want to say with only three words.

Now tags enter our game. They usually only are a few letters long and because they are in square brackets they easily hit your eyes and you know immediately what this post is all about. That saves you a lot of time, but that's not all.

Your news client can usually do even more for you thanks to filter-settings. You can configure your news client to not display any posts with a certain tag in the subject line, what means you don't have to look at those yourself, your news client will not display them right form the start. Sometimes you also may do it the other way round, filtering all posts out except those with a certain tag and only display those.

I give you some examples for this:

• You regularity read posts in a NG about a certain topic, but lot's of people also post off-topic there and you are not interested in anything but on-topic posts.
  ==> You killfile all posts with [OT] in the subject line and that way only see the on-topic posts. 

• You intent to buy a secondhand product to save some money, but all NGs about this topic are way too crowded.
  ==> You killfile all posts except those with [FS] (For Sale) or [FA] (For Auction) in the subject line and only those will be displayed. 

• You regularity post binary files for other people and because you don't know what people would like you to post, you keep on looking for possible requests in those groups, but they are full of binary floods and because of that hard to read.
  ==> You killfile all posts except those with [REQ] (Request) and that way easily see what people are looking for. 

• You don't like to read any posts that are not limited to a single group, but your favorite group has lot's of cross-posts.
  ==> You killfile all posts with [XPOST] in the subject line to not display any of them. 

• Your favorite posts are fanfics, which only are posted very seldom in a crowed group.
  ==> You killfile all posts without [FANFIC] in the subject line and only those will be displayed. 

• You are looking for URLs to webpages inside a Newsgroup, but how will you find those between all the posts, without being fooled by spam posts?
  ==> You killfile all posts except those with [WWW] in the subject line.

Of course you can also combine one or more of those rules at once (e.g. display Requests, For Sale posts and Fanfics, but no Off-Topic posts or Xposts), what is why it's so important that you never combine tags ([OT - FANFIC] or so), since filters will not work anymore. Rather use two separate tags like [OT][FANFIC]. It's also important to use capital letters only, otherwise case-sensitive filters may not work.

You should make use of tags when you write your own posts and make use of filters to save you from wasting time on the Usenet. Last but not least it saves your bandwidth, because killfiled posts will also not getting downloaded in case you chose to download posts automatically.