Hello, and welcome to uk.singles...

This posting is meant to give you a concise introduction to uk.singles. Please do not interpret its shortness as impolite: we urge you to follow up the pointers to further information.

If you're new to Usenet, please read and observe the advice in the news.announce.newusers postings. Most importantly, before posting anything, take time to read some of the articles already here to get a "feel" for what the group is about.

The complete FAQ (frequently asked questions) file for uk.singles can be found on the World Wide Web at The Bestiary, or for a UK copy look on Mimir. We urge you also to read it before posting. A quick preview follows:

To post to uk.singles, you need neither be from the UK nor single. The only requirement is that you have been single at some time in your life, know someone who was, or are interested in some of the subjects that single people have been known to talk about.

Most importantly, uk.singles is not the place for personal ads; uk.adverts.personals is. Posting personals to uk.singles will make you very unpopular very quickly. And you'll get laughed at. Or try Dan Kegel's list of places where personal adverts are welcomed. Other things to avoid are:

• being overly judgemental of other people's views
• quoting large sections of previous postings with negligible addition
• failing to edit appropriately the "newsgroups" line of your article
• posting "test" messages
• mentioning names or other personal information
• having no sense of humour or recognition of irony
• telling everyone how wonderful your new relationship is
• having an AOL account

Apart from what has been mentioned above, pretty much anything goes. Think of uk.singles as the electronic version of something somewhere between a cocktail party and a soap opera. Except here all the guests have bags over their heads and communicate by leaving messages on a sofa, where some messages become irretrievably lost down the back. Then again, you've got all day to come up with that devastating one-line response.

Appropriate posts should be both interactive and entertaining, posing an open question about some aspect of the human condition as it applies to singleness. Or replying to another contributor's post and adding an observation that sheds light on a different aspect of the issue under discussion. Or just making some people out there laugh and shoot Lapsang Souchong out through their noses onto their computer keyboards.

Many topics could not be covered in this brief introduction, but you will find out much more by following the pointers, and just reading the group for a while.

Hope this helps!

Back to Uk.Singles Home Page | Read uk.singles newsgroup | Last updated 3rd July 1997 for new FAQ URLs.