The Charter Form creates one huge paragraph. HTML does not work on it, and Returns mean nothing to it. It scrunches everything up into an ongoing block of copy. Therefore, it is beneficial to spend a little extra time to try to make it as legible as possible. After all, this Charter will be available to be read for the life of the group.

The first part of the Charter needs to explain what the group is about. If it is a Fan group, then a bit about the person you are a fan of would be placed here (is this an actor, a musicisan, etc?). If it is a General Talk group, then that needs to be stated. A Help group? If so, specializing in what? Whatever the specifics of the group are, need to go here.

2. Then, to separate that info into a paragraph that sits by itself, use 75 hyphens (dashes) broken up into 3 sets of 25, with 2 spaces between. I have chosen the hyphen here because it sits in the middle of the line ----- and will give a reasonable amount of space above and below. Periods and Underlines ..... _____ are too low, they look like they are riding on the top of the next line of type. ------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- Depending on if someone has set their WebTV type to small, medium, or large, this will provide either a full straight line of separation, or about 2/3 of a line and 1/3 of a line. Either way, it divides the paragraphs into an easier to read layout.

You should include 2 spaces before and after each line of hyphens. If you forget, the type will butt into the line and it will be harder to read. The Charter Form only sees up to 2 spaces. You may place as many as you like in there, but it wont read them as extra space.

3. Next come the Rules and Regulations for the group. This is not hard and fast, as an open group in alt.discuss can change according to the majority of posters in the group. But it is always a good idea to state the

policy on flaming,
policy on response to trolling,
whether the group is HTML friendly or not,
etc.
There is no way to actually enforce these rules, but it helps to set the tone and gives others something to follow, if they so choose.

4. Here will go another set of 75 hyphens broken up into 3 sets of 25 with 2 spaces before and after each set.

5. If you want to place your user name here, or any other additional information, this is the place to do so. Your Charter is now complete.

6. Here is the TAGLINE space below the Charter Form. This line accepts 60 characters. That will be including any spaces between words. So you will want to count the number of charcters and spaces in your tagline and make sure it will fit.

Example of a Charter written with the above instructions. I am using the Charter I wrote for the alt.discuss.announce.clubs group. I will re-formatt it here to follow these instructions (it was while writing that Charter that I realized that a template for the Charter Form would be a good thing to have).