INTRO: Comp.ai: Introduction and guidelines for posters

          Comp.ai: Introduction and guidelines for posters

Welcome to comp.ai - a moderated newsgroup on Artificial Intelligence.
This article contains introductory information for posters/readers and
a link to the FAQ.  Please read this if you plan to submit to comp.ai.

Comp.ai has existed since the early days of USENET (at least 17 years)
and has been a moderated newsgroup since 5th May 1999.  The official
charter and moderation policies are included at the end of this article.
The moderator is David Kinny ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), but moderation is
done partly automatically by an intelligent :-) agent (the AI-mod-bot).

The AI FAQ (maintained by Ric Crabbe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and Amit Dubey 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>), posted monthly here and also to comp.answers,
is at <URL:http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general/part1> to part6.

Specialized subgroups of comp.ai that are currently active include:

 comp.ai.alife        Artificial Life.
 comp.ai.fuzzy        Fuzzy Logic
 comp.ai.games        AI applied to computer games programming.
 comp.ai.genetic      Genetic programming, evolutionary computation.
 comp.ai.jair.papers  Online papers of the Journal of AI Research. (M)
 comp.ai.jair.announce   Announcements & abstracts of JAIR papers. (M)
 comp.ai.nat-lang     AI applied to natural language processing.
 comp.ai.neural-nets  All aspects of neural networks.
 comp.ai.philosophy   Philosophical aspects of Artificial Intelligence.
 comp.ai.shells       Artificial Intelligence applied to shells.
 comp.ai.vision       Artificial Intelligence Vision Research. (M)


POSTING:  To submit an article, try just posting it, or if that fails
mail your article to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
If your news/mail system is working correctly the article will appear
or you will receive a reply that it was rejected for some reason.  If
you don't see it appear or receive such a reply within a day or two
it's because your return mail address was not valid or reachable, you
have sent spam or something wildly off-topic, or because something
somewhere is seriously broken.  Please feel free to send a followup
query to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, but please DON'T resubmit the
article unless you're sure that it never actually got sent originally.

If you've received an acknowledgement your article will have been or
will eventually be posted or rejected, but it may take some time for
this to occur, and it may take some time more for you to see the article
in your local news feed.  Please be patient!  Some articles are posted
faster (automatically) by the AI-mod-bot, but processing may be slower
if this is the first time you have submitted, your previous submissions
have been rejected for one reason or other, or if you're posting with a
strange subject or from a site used by spammers.


CONTENT:  Posts whose content is "On Topic" will usually be accepted,
but posts may be rejected for a variety of reasons by the AI-mod-bot or
at the moderator's discretion, including those in the moderation policy
below.  Spam, MMF schemes and posts with faked headers may be ignored
without acknowledgement.  Excessively cross-posted articles may be
automatically rejected: please resubmit them to comp.ai separately.

You should really consider whether your article better belongs in one
of the above specialized AI subgroups.  Comp.ai is not intended to be
a forum for articles on specialized topics for which other subgroups
exist, unless they have a clear relevance to a wider AI audience.


FORMAT:  Please send well-formatted posts in English (or American :-)
in plain text (not HTML), without attachments.  Avoid long signatures,
which may get stripped or mangled, excessive quotation, and misleading
Subject lines.  If you are following up a thread that has drifted away
from its original topic, please modify the subject line appropriately.


HEADERS:  Please include a meaningful Subject: line, and if appropriate
begin it with a prefix that helps readers distinguish the type of post.
If your article is an announcement use ANN:, if a Call For Papers or
Participation use CFP:, other suitable prefixes might be JOB:, WANTED:,
etc. In these cases you should probably include a "Followup-To: poster"
header; followups will otherwise automatically be set to the newsgroup.


CHARTER: comp.ai

Comp.ai is a moderated forum for announcements, reports, enquiries and
discussions about the theory, practice, history and state-of-the-art
of Artificial Intelligence.  Its scope is AI in general, but it is not
intended to be a forum for postings concerning areas of AI for which
specialized subgroups exist, unless they have a clear wider relevance.
Announcements of conferences, books, other publications, researches,
applications, educational programs, and other happenings are relevant,
as are those of AI positions available and non-commercial AI software.

Moderation policies:

Postings consistent with this charter are welcomed.  Binary postings,
personal attacks, vulgarity, and postings of a purely commercial
nature will not be accepted, nor will those with an excessive ratio of
quoted to new material or misleading headings.  Posters of frequently
asked questions may instead be directed to relevant resources.


CONTACTS and Acknowledgements:  Correspondence and enquiries abouts
policies, process, posts, problems, etc. should be sent to
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.  The moderation of comp.ai is hosted by the
Intelligent Agent Laboratory at the Department of Computer Science 
and Software Engineering of The University of Melbourne, Australia.

David Kinny, Moderator comp.ai

---
[ comp.ai is moderated.  To submit, just post and be patient, or if ]
[ that fails mail your article to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, and ]
[ ask your news administrator to fix the problems with your system. ]