This leads directly to one of most common and most self-destroying sins of them all - that of Signup Junkie. Just about everyone that I know went through this phase - it's typical for most newbies. They sign up for everything. Why? Because so many companies and organizations make promises which seem to offer solutions, riches and help that it's hard to resist. The end result is, at best, lots of useless spam and at worst loss of lots of money, time and effort.

Other sins are more subtle. For example, one day I was looking at my site statistics when I noticed something very unusual. My bandwidth usage was way too high. You see, my site had been doing about 15gb a month, which is about 500 mb/day. Suddenly my daily report showed my site was doing 2gb/day! At first I was thrilled - my site must have gotten a great ranking in search engines or been profiled in one of big magazines!

My joy was short lived, however, as I continued reviewing report. I soon realized that my site was not more popular - someone had linked directly to one of my images. It was a very high traffic site so every time this page was displayed it hit my site - hammered it hard. If it kept up it became obvious that I was going to get charged for bandwidth overcharges, and it would not be a small bill.

You see, webmasters usually pay a fixed fee for their bandwidth usage up to a certain amount. In my case, it was 27gb/month. Any usage over that amount costs a small fortune, somewhere between $6 and $20 per gigabyte over ceiling.

I was glad that I looked at my statistics because I was able to do something about it. I added a few lines to my htaccess file and more or less removed link. If I hadn't looked at reports, though, I may have had a bill of several hundred dollars.

This is an example of one of most common and most difficult to understand sins of internet. It's called bandwidth stealing, and it's just theft, plain and simple.

One very popular sin is that of copyright infringement. You know what I'm talking about - you've seen it all over place. Those great Star Trek or Star Wars sites with lots of photos and scripts from series? Guess what, they are infringing upon other's copyrights.

Spamming is very popular, and a great way to lose friends, make enemies and generally annoy people. It's not a wonderful way to make any money, as all but truly naive hate spam and delete it immediately without reading. Spamming is a sin and has more or less lost it's usefulness long ago.

The really cool thing about newsgroups is that you can communicate with just about anyone about any subject. Some newsgroups are completely useless because of spam, and others are made useless by hostile users. It's quite common for a very active newsgroup to suddenly become dormant, then start up again.

The key to having a successful newsgroup is having one or more people interested in posting to newsgroup on a regular basis. A newsgroup such as alt.www.webmaster or alt.binaries.clip-art can be wonderful as there are active, interested and interesting people posting all of time. Other newsgroups just contain junk and are avoided like plague.

The thing that can destroy a newsgroup fast is spam. Man, I've watched many newsgroups go straight into toilets due to some idiots without a clue posting vile spam to newsgroup after newsgroup. It may be cool to post an ad or two when it's on-topic (check charter and FAQ first, though), but going beyond that is not acceptable.

So how does one begin using newsgroups? Well, each newsgroup has a culture all to its own, and rules for each newsgroup are different and unique. Sometimes a newsgroup is rancorous and irritable about certain subjects (alt.www.webmaster tends to be more than a little touchy, for example, about Microsoft products and spam). Others are happy and lighthearted (alt.binaries.clip-art comes to mind).