This article is based on material authored by members of the news.newusers.questions Moderation Board and nnq-workers mailing list, particularly by Kathy Morgan. The original article was last updated in 2005.

Finding a place to test your posting skills

Test posts should not be posted to news.newusers.questions.

What to do before testing

• Check your username and reply-to address to make sure that you have no errors in them. The reply-to address is not your street address. It should be an email address.
• Send an email message to yourself.
• When you receive it, try to reply to it by hitting reply. Carefully check the From: address and the Reply-to: address.

You should make sure that your From: address doesn't look like ("you@example.com"@example.com). If it does look like that, you will need to fix your addresses. Try typing you instead of you@example.com where you have your Name and Address in the Options * Mail and News Preferences * Identity window; that should work.

How to find test groups

As you may or may not know, there are two newsgroups available for testing whether your posts are getting through, or whether your .sig file is attached, and so forth and so on. They are:

• misc.test
• alt.test

You may also have a version of local.test or YourISP.test (replace the name of your ISP for YourISP) You can use these groups to test your postings.

Avoiding automatic replies

The group misc.test might automatically send you an email to let you know when and where your test post was received, and quote the headers and a few lines of your post. If you only want to test whether your posts are showing up on your server, or if you don't want the email replies, just put IGNORE or NO REPLY in the Subject line along with the rest of your subject line.