Why Third Party Cancels are Issued:
The majority of third party cancels are issued by spambots for posts which have a BI (Breidbart Index) greater than or
equal to 20. The BI is a mathematical formula used to determine the level of Excessive
Cross Posting (ECP) Excessive Multi-Posting (EMP). Anything with a BI
of 20 or greater has been determined cancelable.
Third party cancels can also be used to remove binary posts from non-binary groups. The convention here is that since
binaries files tend to be very large and take up so much space on the servers,
that they should only be placed in those groups that are chartered to allow binaries. Most, but not all, of these are in the alt.binary
hierarchy. These NG tend to have shorter retention periods, the more rapid expiration of posts
minimizing the amount of space needed to store the binaries. Binaries found outside of these groups are
traditionally "cancel on sight".
The last "valid" use of a third party cancel is in *legitimate* retro-moderation. The critical term here is legitimate. Only
those groups which are chartered as a moderated group can be moderated, and then only by the chartered moderator.
Retro-moderation in a newsgroup that is *not* chartered as a moderated group, or cancels by anyone
other than the named moderator are rogue cancels.
What To Do If Your Posts are Being Cancelled:
First of all make sure your posts haven't fallen into one of the valid reasons for being cancelled. If your
posts have been cancelled by the spambots or you have had a binary cancelled from a non binary group,
you are not going to get a lot of sympathy or help from the offending service. If the spambots have cancelled
your posts and you genuinely believe that what you have posted was not spam, you can politely post
in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet and explain what you have posted and
ask for help in preventing the spambots from canceling. Now, be advised with the exception of repeat postings of FAQs, it is
highly unlikely that a post will hit a BI of 20 without being spam. You will
be presumed guilty until proven innocent, so post accordingly. Remember you are asking for help.
If you are posting to a moderated newsgroup and the moderator is canceling your posts, you are really out of luck. Moderators are
omnipotent in their newsgroups and can cancel anything they want. Your only recourse here is to write the moderator and ask nicely why
you are being cancelled. If you cannot come to terms with the moderator, you are
going to have to find another non-moderated newsgroup.
If your posts fit none of these categories, you need to track the person canceling the posts. This is not an easy thing to do
unfortunately. All posts are cancelled by the issuance of a "cmsg
cancel". These cmsgs are send to the pseudogroup control. and sorted
out in the sub pseudogroup control.cancel. Most ISPs carry the control
groups on their news feeds and some web based news services carry the control groups.
There are over 10,000 cmsgs sent to this
group every day. Consequently, the retention time is generally in hours not
days. If your post is cancelled, you have a very short time span to snag the cmsg in. Additionally, sophisticated cancellers
can set a much shorter expire time on the cmsg post and you may only have minutes.
In order to find the specific "cmsg cancel" that cancelled any individual post, you will need the Message ID of the post that was
cancelled. This can be found in the full headers of the post after it is made. Since the headers are no longer available after a post is
cancelled, you might want to get in the habit of copying your posted
messages to your harddrive or noting the Message IDs. Make sure you are copying off the newsserver, the copy saved in
your sent file will not have the appropriate Message ID.
If your post gets cancelled, go immediately to the control.cancel newsgroup and search for your Message ID. Keep watching it until it
appears. Archive the entire message, with complete headers to send to the offending service. Once you have the headers, you are simply
doing a trace of the Usenet header, like you would for any other post. See
this page for more on reading Usenet
headers.
