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Unseenet Working Group                                     A. Lorensen
UN-RFC: 0014                                              October 2026
Category: Standards Track
Status: Draft
Updates: 0004

                  Unseenet: Group Rules (Charters)

Abstract

A group's owner can publish the group's purpose and rules - its charter - in the group's manifest. Because the manifest is signed, replicated and versioned, every reader on every node sees the same rules, and nobody but the owner can change them. Clients show the rules before a reader first posts.

1. Motivation

Usenet groups had charters, posted regularly and collected in FAQs, and newcomers were expected to read them before posting. They lived in ordinary posts, so they expired, could be forged, and were easy to miss. Unseenet has a better place for them: the manifest.

2. Manifest Field

UN-RFC 0004 section 3.1 is extended with:

Field Type Meaning
rules string The charter: purpose and rules, plain text, max 8192 characters

The existing fields title (one line) and description (a short paragraph) remain for listings; rules is the full text.

Changing the rules is changing the manifest: the owner publishes a new manifest with a higher serial (UN-RFC 0004 section 3.2). Readers can see that the rules changed by the serial.

For closed groups, the manifest is public (UN-RFC 0004 section 6.6). Owners who do not want the rules to be public SHOULD put them in the encrypted sealed object instead, under the same name rules.

3. Clients

A client:

  • MUST offer a way to read a group's rules;
  • SHOULD show them when the reader opens the group for the first time, and again when the manifest's serial has changed since the reader last saw them;
  • SHOULD remind the reader that the group has rules when they write their first post in it.

Rules are plain text and MUST be displayed as such, never interpreted as markup or followed as links automatically.

4. Enforcement

Rules are social, not technical. Nodes do not check posts against them. What enforces them is what the group type offers: moderators in moderated groups, the owner's choice of posters in channels, membership in closed groups, cancels by the owner (UN-RFC 0004 section 7), and each reader's own filters.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2026 the persons identified as the document authors. This document is licensed under CC BY 4.0, see rfc/LICENSE.md.