When you've lurked enough and want to start posting then I suggest you still start slowly and stay with Dejanews.. You can set up an e-mail and news account (for free of course, they are supported by banner advertizing). The advantages to creating a dejanews account is that dejanews will track the posts you've read, thread the messages for you, and of course allow you to post messages.

The only place that you're supposed to post non stories is in alt.sex.stories.d or the soc.subculture groups (soc.subculture is a mixture of discussion and stories). However considering the flood of advertizing in the non-moderated groups, no one is likely to complain about anything you're likely to write, though outside the designated discussion groups no one is likely to reply either.

And now we come to the "Safe posting & SPAM" part of this article. You're ready to post. Congradulations! A new voice is a wonderful thing! You've been lurking for a while so you already know about all those hidious commercial messages that make finding the stories and such kinda hard to find. The comemrcials are called SPAM. Everybody hates them, so you're not alone. The only thing you can really do is ignore them and refuse to patronize any service which is advertized this way. These people are not supporting Usenet, they are destroying it. Moderated groups have no spam. A real person checks each post and makes sure it's commercial free and on-topic before allowing others to see it. Moderated groups are the oasises and you'll probably be spending the bulk of your time there.

But back to posting. SPAM is bad enough, but when you post a message on Usenet there are people who have programs that collect email addresses from Usenet posts. If you post, you will suddenly start to get unsolicited commercial ads in your email box. If you post in an adult area of Usenet you'll start getting X-Rated commercial ads. But there is a cure. Either set up a mailbox on dejanews or get a free mailbox from Hotmail, Yahoo, or any of the other countless free mailbox providers.

Make sure you configure dejanews to use your throw away box as the address and not your real, personal box. This will allow you a great deal of anonymity, it will allow the friends you make on Usenet to get in touch with you, and it ensures that anything sent to that box (spam, notes from friends, etc) is seen only by you, not your wife, kids or boss.

When you're ready to become a power user then most ISPs offer a Usenet newsfeed. To set it up, you'll need to get a real newsreader (the ones from Microsoft and Netscape which are built into the browser do not count -- they simply aren't powerful enough to do the job). The best newsreader currently available is Forte's Agent. Free Agent is free. Agent costs $40.00 but the powerful features such as email handling and SPAM filters make it very, very worth your money. I use agent personally every day and I've never regretted my choice in newsreaders for a second.

Now that you're handling your own news through agent and your ISP you're going to discover that Dejanews filters out 99% of the spam while your ISP doesn't!!!! Groups where the spam were annoying before now become almost unreadable! There are three cures.