Unacceptable behaviour is always a serious abuse of News, and not necessarily abuse on News. To qualify as unacceptable, an act must interfere with the use and / or enjoyment of a significant number of people rather than one or two individuals.

Under the terms of this AUP, unacceptable use includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Chain Letters and Ponzi Pyramid-Selling Schemes:
  Such articles work (or rather, don't work) in much the same way as their paper-based cousins. The most common example of this on Usenet is MAKE-MONEY-FAST. In addition to being a waste of resources, such posts are illegal in certain countries.
• Commercial Articles:
  The vast majority of newsgroups are of a non-commercial nature, and readers of those newsgroups will object most strongly to commercial traffic.
  Commercial traffic is accepted as being any posting that solicits payment, in money or otherwise, for the provision of goods or services of some kind.
  Whilst SBB have a policy of not acting on the content of news articles, most commercial articles will fall foul of one of the other clauses of this AUP, for example by being crossposted or multiple posted and will therefore be judged accordingly and subject to the ACTIONS contained in this AUP.
• Binary Postings to non-Binary Groups
  Outside of the alt.binaries... and alt.pictures... newsgroup hierarchies, the posting of encoded binary data is considered most unwelcome. The majority of Usenet sites and readers do not have the capability for selective transmission of articles (killfiling) and such posts can result in a significant amount of resources being tied up and wasted in the transmission process, and as such can be considered as a denial of service attack on multiple recipients.
• Excessive Cross-Posting (velveeta)
  Simply put, this form of unacceptable behaviour occurs when the same article is cross-posted to a large number of unrelated newsgroups.
• Excessive Multi-Posting (Spam)
  Simply put, this form of unacceptable behaviour occurs when a substantively similar (perhaps differing only in Subject header) article is posted to a large number of unrelated newsgroups.
• Forged Headers / Addresses
  There are several types of unacceptable behaviour involving the forgery of article headers or posting addresses.
  • It is abuse to post articles with headers which would mislead recipients into believing that some other system or user had created the articles.
  • It is abuse to post articles with headers which would cause responses to these articles, solicited or otherwise, to be delivered to unwilling third parties, or to inappropriate or unreasonable newsgroups. In particular, it is abuse to arrange for email replies to be delivered to an email address which you do not have permission to use.
• Other Unwelcome Activities
  The above are the more easily defined examples of unacceptable use. Unacceptable Use of the any news service is not limited to the above, but may include any activity reported to the Shetland Internet Abuse team which is considered, in the sole opinion of SBB, to be a serious abuse of any news service.

Unacceptable behaviour via SBB accounts may result in action as follows:

• First offence:
  The account will be suspended and the customer will be given seven days to present, in writing, to SBB, an apology from the poster and an undertaking not to repeat the offence. The apology will be held on file for an indefinite period, and at the discretion of SBB and/or the newsmaster or moderator of the affected news service, both the apology and the undertaking may be posted to the appropriate Usenet administration newsgroups, or be made otherwise available to the Internet community at large.
  The account will be restored only after both items have been received by SBB and deemed to be of an acceptable nature.
  Failure of the poster to present such an apology and undertaking after seven days may result in the customer's account being terminated in its entirety.
   
• Second offence:
  The customer account will be terminated immediately (as may any other account identified as belonging to the same customer).
  No refund of monies paid for the account will be made, except as specified in the standard Conditions of Use.