Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval
1198319
201393677
2008-03-27T19:32:13Z
GregorB
179697
[[Category:Usenet]]
The '''Good NetKeeping Seal of Approval''' or '''GNKSA''' is a designation that indicates a piece of [[Usenet]] [[News client|newsreader]] (client) [[software]] meets a set of usability and formatting standards. The name is a play on the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval", a set of consumer reports issued by [[Good Housekeeping]] Magazine.
The original GNKSA author thought that many [[newbie]]s to Usenet posted malformed or inappropriately-sent articles because their software did not encourage better [[netiquette]]. For instance, software which made it easy to confuse ''replying to a sender by email'' with ''posting a followup to a newsgroup'' led to users mistakenly publishing what was intended to be a private response, or vice versa.
Some of the guidelines from GNKSA 2.0
*The user can see the essential header fields, including "Newsgroups" and "Followup-To".
*The user can edit all header fields when composing a follow up.
*There is a clear difference between 'followup' and 'reply'.
*Followups preserve the Subject and References of the original article, unless the user explicitly changes them.
*News software respects "Followup-To" and "Reply-To" specifications.
*What the user writes is what gets posted, as is.
Additional requirements concern accurate <CODE>From:</CODE> headers, [[signature block]] formatting, and the ability to cancel and supersede articles.
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard has proposed a similar [http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/Proposals/gnksoa-mua.html Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval for Mail User Agents].
==External links==
*[http://www.gnksa.org/ The Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval 2.0]
*[http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/software/good-netkeeping-seal/ GNSKA at FAQs.org]
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[[Category:Usenet]]