"What on Disc does 'afp' mean?"
A Fat Penguin? Alfred Feels Perky? Another Frisky Program?
No, afp is the collective term for that gathering of Internet users who post witty, erudite, intelligent and sometimes downright mad messages to alt.fan.pratchett. You may have heard references to it somewhere - indeed, it seems to dominate the Discworld-related Internet like a very dominating thing.
As I cannot possibly hope to rival the L-Space Web's veritable encyclopaedia of information about afp, I won't. I will just include a few handy hints for the newbie:
What is a newbie?
If you are asking this question, then you are. A newbie is an un-enlightened afper (or MUDder), who hasn't had a chance to find out how everything works, probably hasn't posted or has only posted once and is basically clueless as to what's happening.
How do I stop being a newbie?
By lurking for a while, reading the FAQs (located at www.lspace.org) and generally figuring out what's going on.
What do all these letters mean?
You must be referring to [M], [I], [G], [R], [A], [F], [C] and [abp]. These are defined in the FAQ entitled "Acronymphomania!" (IIRC, posted by ppint) and must be included in your subject header so that people can set their killfiles appropriately. They stand for: [M] - meta, referring to the newsgroup itself; [I] - irrelevant, an off-topic subject (off-topic? on afp? hah!); [G] - games, referring to the various Discworld games (including MUD); [R] - relevant, related to the Discworld/Terry Pratchett; [A] - annotation for a book (put "spoilers" in the header if the book isn't available in paperback yet); [F] - fan activity, meets, merchandise etc.; [C] - cascade, a long post which often meanders far from its original topic; [abp] - cross-posted from alt.books.pratchett.
What's a killfile?
If you are using a newsreader such as Free Agent or Outlook Express, you can choose only to display messages with a certain subject letter in the header. This can prevent you from seeing all irrelevant posts, for example.
My server doesn't have all the messages!
The good folks at lspace have provided a news server just for Discworld-related newsgroups: news.lspace.org. Just set up another news account or change the existing one, and voila - all the messages!
You said 'newsgroups'.
Yes, there are other groups: alt.books.pratchett (abp) is a lower-volume, more relevant group, alt.fan.pratchett.announce is where announcements such as tour dates are posted (also cross posted to afp and abp) and alt.talk.mended-drum is a moderated, totally irrelevant newsgroup for hardened afpers.
People on afp are being ironic towards me. Help!
Don't worry, we often employ irony towards newbies. It's just our way of being friendly.
Anything I shouldn't do?
Don't post very obvious annotations until you've checked the APF (at lspace) - also, please don't post messages like "This is a test" - alt.lspace.test is for that. Messages like "what does [I] mean?" are also not looked upon very kindly - and please, please *try* to spell and use grammar!
Copyright © Terry Pratchett from the Discworld (R) Novels. Maintained by Jennie Lees, lees@mistral.co.uk - 1998.