Re: The Proper Etiquette of Cross-Posting--Is There Any?

On Fri, 23 May 2008 12:37:09 -0400, Lewis wrote
(in article <slrng3dsll.137i.g.kreme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

In message <0001HW.C45C493B002863F0B01AD9AF@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
The title of this posting pretty much sums it up. Are there times
when cross-posting is acceptible? Are there times when it is not? Is
there an acceptable limit to the number of cross postings?

Cross-posting is the preferred way to post to multiple groups.
However, posting to multiple groups is generally not a good idea, and
should be avoided as much as possible. When a message is of genuine
interest to multiple groups and ON TOPIC to multiple groups, then a
cross-post is appropriate. HOWEVER, a Followips-To header should
*ALWAYS* be included in a cross-posted article.

I disagree with your position on follow-ups.

For example, alt.usage.english and alt.english.usage are two groups with 100%
topic overlap. People learning English often post usage questions to both
groups and get responses from both groups. In this case it only makes sense
for the threads to be the same in both groups.

Some months ago someone crossposted a question about what to call the # sign
to both alt.usage.english and alt.folklore.computers. That crossposted
thread ran for weeks and upwards of 1000 posts (and lots of topic drift) with
pleasant joint participation and cross pollenation of the groups.

Before alt.folklore.urban went to hell it often had productive crossposted
threads with alt.usage.english.

For example, when posting about a new Terry Pratchett book one might
crosspost to the alt.fan.pratchett and to a rec.arts.books, but set
the followups to afp.

I don't understand why you advocate that. If someone from rab enters the
conversation, why would he want to be shut out of the follow-ups to his post?
Many people filter/kill mesages posted to more than 3 or 4 groups. I
would say three is about the maximum one should cross-post too.

Here we agree.

In my own case the newsreader I use, Hogwasher, allows one to create
subscriptions which cluster together an arbitrary number of selected
newsgroups and anything posted to a multiplicity of those newsgroups
appears in the subscription's incoming message list only once. Is
such behavior generally true of other newsreaders?

Hogwasher is the only newsreader I know of that does that. I use that
feature to merge alt.usage.english and alt.english.usage, but it's not a
useful feature for a thread crossposted between, say, afc and aue, as
described above. That thread drove me crazy, since Hogwasher doesn't...

...know to mark a post read once it has been read and
not presenet it anew in another group. This is why crossposting is
better than multiposting.

Crossposting also allows synergy, as in the # thread mentioned above.

--
John Varela
Trade NEW lamps for OLD for email.

.

Relevant Pages

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