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                                    FidoNews
                                    FidoNews

                          Article Submission Guidelines
                          Article Submission Guidelines

                                  Last Updated
                                21 February 1986









     FidoNews is the user group newsletter of the users of the FidoNet(tm)
     remote bulletin board network.  As of this writing it has an estimated
     readership of seventy thousand people nationwide.  In keeping with the
     nature of FidoNet(tm), FidoNews is an electronic newsletter which is
     passed from node to node over the network.  All of the articles which
     appear in FidoNews are written by users of FidoNet(tm).  FidoNews is
     very much an electronic newsletter by, of, and for Fido users and
     sysops.  This document describes the technical aspects of submitting
     an article to FidoNews.



























FidoNews Submission Guidlines                                           Page 1

     _________________________
     INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

     FidoNews is assembled as a scheduled event at FidoNet(tm) node 1/1.
     Every Monday morning a special utility called MAKENEWS is run, which
     puts together the various articles which have been received and
     generates the latest issue.  The ROBOT utility is then run to place
     release messages into the network mail area, so that the finished
     newsletter will be automatically mailed out during the Monday morning
     national mail slot.

     The intended purpose of this procedure is to ensure that FidoNews is
     assembled and released on time, even if node 1/1 is unattended on
     Sunday night.

     In practice, the primary purpose of the MAKENEWS utility is to scan
     the articles which have been submitted for any technical disqualifica-
     tions.  If MAKENEWS finds an article which does not meet its technical
     specs, then a message is logged and that article is not included in
     the newsletter.  At this point the article must be modified by hand
     until it passes the technical requirements.  Since this is dependant
     on the availability of human resources, then an article which fails to
     meet the specs may be delayed indefinitely, or even cancelled
     entirely.

     Much of this document is intended to describe the technical specifica-
     tions which an article must meet in order to be included in the news-
     letter.































FidoNews Submission Guidlines                                           Page 2

     _____________________
     SUBMITTING AN ARTICLE

     The first step, of course, is to create a file which contains the text
     of your article.  You should then send the file via FidoNet(tm) mail to
     node 1/1.

     Filename extensions are used to distinguish types of submissions, as
     follows:

         .ART      An article, commentary, open letter, or general news
                   item.

         .SAL      A "For Sale" advertisement.

         .WAN      A "Wanted" advertisement.

         .COL      A column, or other regular feature.

         .NOT      A notice for the back of the issue.

     If your file doesn't have one of the above extensions, then it will
     lay around taking up disk space until some human takes a look at it
     and realizes what it is.

     The name of the file is up to you, though you should use a name which
     is not likely to be "stepped on" by someone else.  For example,
     FNEWS.ART is probably not a good name for an article.


     If you are writing a regular feature, such as a column or a series of
     articles, you can put a number at the end of the name, and submit
     several in a batch.  For example, you could send in a set of five
     files, named:

          MYWORD1.COL
          MYWORD2.COL
          MYWORD3.COL
          MYWORD4.COL
          MYWORD5.COL

     These would be used one at a time in sequence.  MYWORD1.COL would be
     printed the first week, MYWORD2.COL the second, and so on.
















FidoNews Submission Guidlines                                           Page 3

     ________________________
     TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

     This section describes the technical requirements which an article
     must pass before the MAKENEWS utility will include it in FidoNews.  If
     your file does not meet these criteria, then, again, it will languish
     on the disk until some human steps in and fixes it.

     These constraints are for purely practical reasons.  There are roughly
     a million different word processors out there, all with their own
     different formats.  We simply do not have the time to convert them all
     to the format we use.

     1. FLUSH LEFT MARGIN:  The finished FidoNews is indented five columns.
        We do that here.  If your submission is also indented, then your
        indent will be added to ours.  So please set your left margin all
        the way at the edge of the screen.

     2. RIGHT MARGIN AT COLUMN 65 OR LESS:  Less is tolerable, more is
        definitely not.

     3. NO FUNNY CHARACTERS:  This includes formfeeds, returns without
        linefeeds, linefeeds without returns, and other oddities.

     4. NO GRAPHICS CHARACTERS:  Believe it or not, not everyone in the
        world has an IBM PC.  Please restrict yourself to printable ASCII
        characters in the range 20 hex to 7E hex (space to tilde).

        However, if you are using PC-Write to create your file, then feel
        free to use the "hard space", "hard hyphen", and "soft hyphen"
        characters.  MAKENEWS understands them, and will handle them
        properly.

     5. TOTAL ARTICLE LENGTH:  Well, there IS an upper limit, but I'm not
        going to say what it is, because:

        a) it's pretty big,
        b) it changes from time to time, and
        c) we override it now and then, as the circumstances merit.

        Advertisements and notices are an exception.  Since we don't charge
        for ads, we feel justified in limiting them.  The maximum length of
        an advertisement is rather small (never more than one page).

     6. WHERE IS THIS ARTICLE FROM:  A good question!  You can submit an
        article anonymously if you want to, but most folks start out by
        stating their name and node number.

     If you want your article to be listed in the table of contents, then
     you should start it with a "content line".  This is just a normal
     line, except that it is the FIRST line of your file, and it begins
     with an asterisk ("*").  Here's an example of a content line:

         * My Word!





FidoNews Submission Guidlines                                           Page 4

     _______
     EXAMPLE

     Here's a sample of what a typical submission might look like:


	A Sample Article


Thom Henderson
Fido 1/1

                         This Is My Title


And here is my article.  Note that it is flush left (zero
indent).  Also note that the right margin is at column sixty
five, so that the result will look good when the formatter sets
it up.  I also started the file with a content line, so my
article will be listed in the table of contents.

    Figure 1.               Table 1.
    +-------+               ========
    | A Box |               Alfa
    +-------+               Bravo

Note that I am not using any funny characters.  This ensures that
the final article will look the same to every user, no matter
what sort of hardware he has.

This is the last sentence of my article.


     And that's all there is to it!  You should be able to get a file like
     this out of any word processor.



























FidoNews Submission Guidlines                                           Page 5

     _________________
     FORMATTING ADVICE

     There are certain things you should do to improve the general
     appearance of your article when it is published.  After all, seventy
     thousand of your fellow users will be looking at it.  You want it to
     look good, don't you?

     You may have noticed that FidoNews articles are separated by dashed
     lines.  These are inserted by MAKENEWS, so you shouldn't add them
     yourself.  If you put a dashed line at the top and/or bottom of your
     article, then it will appear right next to the dashed line MAKENEWS
     inserts.  Since your line is almost certain to be a different length,
     then the result will not look very good.

     You should also put a blank line between paragraphs.  This sets them
     off better than just indenting the first line, and makes you article
     easier to read.

     You should not, however, put a lot of blank space at the top or bottom
     of your article.  MAKENEWS works hard to make sure that the articles
     are well separated to the eye, so any space you add at the ends will
     just waste paper when someone prints out the news.

     If you want to put in a table or a figure, go right ahead.  MAKENEWS
     does not rearrange text, so your table or figure will remain exactly
     as you entered it.

     If you want to justify the right margin, please feel free.  You may
     also leave it ragged if you wish.  An even right margin looks neater,
     while a ragged margin makes for text that is easier to read.  A friend
     of mine once told me that an even right margin is really just a
     gimmick, since typesetters don't really do it that way, but you decide
     for yourself.


     ____________
     OTHER ADVICE

     The biggest thing I see, the thing that irks me most, is when someone
     submits an article that is full of basic errors in spelling, grammar,
     and/or punctuation.  Please remember, seventy thousand people will be
     reading what you write.  Please, for your own sake, use a dictionary
     when you're not sure how a word is spelled.  Or, if you're not good at
     grammar, get a friend to help you write your article.  We ain't the
     Literary Digest here, and our standards are pretty (very) lax.  If
     you're willing to write it, we'll put it in.  It's just that it's in
     your own best interest to come off looking good.


     _________________
     EDITORIAL CONTENT

     I suppose I should say something about article content.  Basically,
     it's up to you.  As we've stated many times, FidoNews isn't ours, it's
     yours.  We will publish ANYTHING.  Most articles tend to be related in
     some way to personal computing, but that is by no means a requirement
     on our part.



FidoNews Submission Guidlines                                           Page 6

     _____________________________
     WHEN WILL YOUR ARTICLE APPEAR

     A good question indeed, and almost impossible to answer.

     If FidoNews is running unattended (as it sometimes does in the
     summer), then all received articles that meet the above criteria will
     probably be published in the third issue after they are received.

     The reason for the delay is to allow us some time to "play" with each
     issue before it goes out.  You see, while things are set up to get the
     news out even when node 1/1 is unattended, we still usually go over
     everything by hand.  Fitting together a newsletter is in some respects
     like assembling a jigsaw puzzle.  Some parts have to go right away,
     while others can wait a bit.  Some articles are longer than others.
     And articles seem to arrive here in "spurts".  We might get two
     articles one week, and then twenty the next.  We generally try to keep
     the issues more-or-less the same size, so you don't get a fifty page
     newsletter one week, and a two page newsletter the next.

     So sometimes we'll push an article up, and publish it right away.
     More often we'll hold it back for a short while.  As a general rule,
     we usually have some idea of how the next three newsletters are
     shaping up, so we usually juggle things around a bit to try and even
     things out.


     _________
     YOUR TURN

     I've typed enough for one night.  Now it's YOUR turn to sit down and
     write that article you're thinking about!  Best wishes, and good luck!




























FidoNews Submission Guidlines                                           Page 7