Usenet Net News is more than just a distributed bulletin board system. It is a community which, while not having formal laws or rules, has a large body of accepted social conventions that govern the behavior of its participants. Because there are no written rules, what the acceptable conventions are is a topic frequently in dispute. For the purposes of this thesis, we have adopted the following conservative guidelines based on observations of discussions on the newsgroups news.future and news.admin.policy.
[No Alterations]
The system may not alter in any way an existing article - to do so
violates the rights of the article's author. In particular, it would
not be permissible to add extra header fields to an article which were
used to indicate the net-wide opinion of an article.
[Decentralized] Avoid centralized servers or clearinghouses. Usenet is an anarchy with very little central control. There is no one site or entity with responsibility for all of Usenet, and no one site or entity is able to control, censor, or shut-down Usenet. This decentralization is useful from a legal standpoint as there is no organizational entity to sue, and important to administrators who need and want control over their sites. Furthermore, much of the robustness of Net News stems from its decentralized nature.
It was primarily to avoid making alterations to existing
articles that we decided to store the vote information separately
from the articles themselves. In the absence of this restriction, it
would be convenient to store the votes received by an article as extra
header fields in the article.