What is the UDP?
UDP stands for the “Usenet Death Penalty”, the final weapon against those that attempt to abuse Usenet. It is never entered into lightly. Originally, the UDP referred to auto-cancellation of all messages from a certain site as a final solution to too much abuse. As Usenet terms tend to change over time, the meaning mutated into meaning to refer to the aliasing out of a certain site by many major sites, thus “shunning” them off of Usenet. This latter method is now more commonly called a “passive UDP”, and is widely accepted as being only the decision of the sites involved; the former has been renamed to “active UDP”, and is much more controversial. Active UDPs are saved for those sites that absolutely refuse to stop abuse from their systems. Sites which allow abuse of their system for weeks straight are given warnings, culminating in a public discussion of whether a UDP is warranted. If a consensus is reached that it is necessary, the offending site is given a week to fix the problem –
