Re: what is the concept of "follow up-to" while posting ?

"M.Parker" <mparker@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
VanguardLH wrote:
M.Parker wrote:

while cross posting to more than 3 groups with my newsreader
Thunderbird, it is asking me to select follow up-to options.

I'm confusing what exactly it is?

please, could you people let me know that
why should I do that?

The updated( or replay posts) too are appearing in a single group
which I selected from the follow up- to options? why like this?

They are not getting updated in all the cross posted news groups.why?

Here is my take on the MISuse of the FollowUp-To header. Many
newsreaders seem to default to using this header although it doesn't
apply (or shouldn't apply if you wish to be polite to your readers).
I've even seen posters who submit their article to just ONE group and
then use the FollowUp-To header to point at that same group. Dumb!

Many general netiquette articles will say to use the FollowUp-To header
if you cross-post to multiple groups. I have yet to see a reasonable
qualification for that rule. It seems to get re-proliferated without
due cause: some other netiquette article mentions it but the author of
the new netiquette article doesn't know why so they just copy it into
"their" rules article. In fact, it use is rude to the visitors of the
groups to which you cross-posted but decide not to continue the
discussion there. They're hungry to respond, see the sumptuous feast
but it's taken out of their reach, and when they put in the dollar
bills to buy it they get nothing on their side of the glass.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html gives some recommendations
regarding netiquette. However, not even this "standards" article
(informational only) details why or when the FollowUp-To header should
be used.

The OP wants to continue reading replies to their post in a particular
newsgroup. They do NOT need to use the FollowUp-To header to do that.
That "home" group was already specified amongst those to which they
posted. In short: If your thread is not appropriate to continue
discussing it in the other newsgroups then don't post it there.


--- Rant on inappropriate use of the FollowUp-To header ---

Don't use the FollowUp-To header. Posting to, say, 3 newsgroups but
moving replies to just 1 of them or to a completely different one means
you disconnect the visitors of those other 2 (or 3) newsgroups from the
rest of the discussion. If a newsgroup is appropriate for your post
then it is also appropriate for the replies. Or, converserly, if the
continued discussion of your post is not appropriate in all the
newsgroups to which you cross-posted then you should not have posted to
those other newsgroups in the first place. You are using the
FollowUp-To header to move replies to YOUR "home" newsgroup but which
the users of the other newsgroups may not visit. After all, if you
cross-post and include your "home" newsgroup then you'll see all those
replies in your home newsgroup and meanwhile all the other users can
still see the replies in their newsgroup where you decided to also
publish your post.

In http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/primer/part1/, it says, "For a
cross-post, you may want to set the Followup-To: header line to the
most suitable group for the rest of the discussion". Read another way,
that means you disconnect the discussion from all the visitors of the
other newsgroups to which you decided to publish your post. Why did
you publish to those other newsgroups if you are going to yank the
discussion away from those users and perhaps even from the respondents
you were attempting to elicit? It is exasperating to post a reply and
never see it in the newsgroup where you read the original post. If
your post was appropriate for all the groups to which you cross-posted
then why wouldn't those same groups be appropriate for the replies? To
yank away the discussion to your "home" group is rude since that is
probably not the "home" group for your respondents. You wanted replies
which may require further replies but now your respondents no longer
see the thread in the newsgroup that they visit to where you published
your post. Also, the respondents may not know if their reply is
appropriate in the "home" group that you happen to choose. In general,
malcontents and spammers use the FollowUp-To header to hide negative
replies to their flame or spam posts, often sending the replies off to
a *.test newsgroup. Is that the company of users to which you want to
be associated?

There are some cases where FollowUp-To should be used. For example,
say a newsgroup is supposed to only get used for citing the content of
a spam e-mail. Discussions about that spam are not supposed to be
published in that citing newsgroup. Just the exhibits are published
there. If someone wants to discuss that particular spam, their replies
should go into a different newsgroup meant for those discussions. I
believe that is how some of the NANAE newsgroups operate but the
principle may apply elsewhere, like for an *.announce group where only
announcements are to be made but discussions about them are to be
posted in another group; however, it is rare few newsgroups where
FollowUp-To is appropriate. For the vast majority of newsgroups,
FollowUp-To is *not* appropriate. If you do not want continue the
discussion in the other newsgroups then don't cross-post over there to
only then use FollowUp-To to yank away the continued discussion. If
the discussion is not appropriate in those other newsgroups then it
seems you have self-nominated your post to be off-topic and hence spam.

If you do use the FollowUp-To header, you are expected per netiquette
to alert the readers of your post that you used that header. Be polite
and add a note (at the start of your post) saying that you used the
header (ex., "WARNING: FollowUp-To was used and points to <newsgroup>".
You might also want to explain why you consider any further discussion
in the other newsgroups is inappropriate despite your rudeness in
posting to those other newsgroups. Many times respondents wonder where
their reply post went because they expect to see it in the group they
visited and where they read your post. Not all NNTP clients alert the
user that the poster used the FollowUp-To header. Think about it: you
post to multiple newsgroups but yank the replies to a different
newsgroup than where your respondents visited, then you need more help
and reply to those replies but which are now only in your "home"
newsgroup, but the respondents won't see their posts nor will they see
your replies to them asking for more help. FollowUp-To is not required
when you cross-post since your "home" newsgroup should be one those
that were specified in the list of newsgroups. You'll watch the
discussion in your home newsgroup and the respondents or lurkers can
watch that same discussion in their own newsgroup. If you don't want
replies to show up in all the newsgroups to which you cross-posted then
don't cross-post over there in the first place!

When crossposting, there are not multiple copies of your post that
wastes bandwidth for each to get them propagated to other NNTP servers
and there aren't multiple copies of your post consuming disk space. A
single copy gets sent to the other NNTP servers and a single copy
resides on each NNTP server with pointers to it to make it show up in
multiple newsgroups. You aren't saving bandwidth or disk space by
redirecting replies for a cross-posted message to a single newsgroup.
You are just being rude to the visitors of the other newsgroups to
which you cross-posted but tried to yank away the discussion.

--- End of rant ---
wow...! such a nice reply, keep it up :-)

well, in my Thunderbird it is explicitly asking me to select the
"Follow up-to" option, while cross posting, other wise my posts are not
getting submitted.

How to disable this feature? please, let me know that.

Don't cross post.

At the end, what I realized is that 'Opting Follow up-to option is not a
good practice'. Am I right?

PS: once again to -> you, very nice reply;

First, no one seemed to answer to you first question about what Followup-To
was used for or what it did. Did you figure that out in all the
discussion?

It's a header that lists a set of newsgroups and when anyone posts a
follow-up message, it gets sent to the newsgroups in the Followup-To:
header instead of to the groups in the Newsgroups: header. It can be badly
abused by causing followups to go to groups that the original was not
posted to. But typical correct usage is to allow larger crossposts, with
the Followup-TO reducing the discussion to a smaller set of groups -
typically just one of the original groups. It was added because it's
considered bad form to force a potentially long thread to fill up multiple
groups.

However, I have to agree with Mike. Cross posting is almost always wrong.
Usenet would have been far better if the feature was just never added.
Followup-To was added to reduce the problems that cross posting caused.
Both features are advanced user features that worked fine when most people
using Usenet were advanced users and stopped working a few decades back as
Usenet became flooded with newbies.

There are only a few rare exceptions where cross posting is valid, and even
fewer where Followup-To is valid.

The typical reason people cross-post is because they are selfish jerks
trying to get free help from as many people as they can bother, or
desperate attention seekers that like to inflate their own ego by forcing
people to read their nonsense. Neither are valid reasons for cross
posting.

Usenet groups group designed so that every possible topic to be discussed
has one, and only one place, where it best fits. Whatever it is you want
to ask, or discuss, your job as a good Usenet citizen, is to find that
place, and post your message, there and ONLY there.

If your topic seems to cover multiple groups, there is seldom any reason to
post it to multiple groups. It's not the group you are seeking by posting.
It's the readers who might read, and reply to your message you are seeking
the attention of. Whatever your topic, there will always be one group,
that it fits better than any other. If you post to that group, you will
get the people on Usenet who care most about that topic, reading your post.
If there's another group with a similar topic, it's highly likely that most
the people who read the first group, also read the second. And as such,
you aren't gaining by posting it to both groups. Some are likely to be
using a newsreader doesn't correctly filter duplicates so you might even be
forcing them to read your message twice. And the people that don't read
the first group, but do read the second, don't read the first group for a
reason - it's not a topic of interest to them. And as such, cross posting
to the second group, only ends up forcing people that don't care about your
topic, to read your message and all the followups it is likely to generate.

For example, I read the rec.crafts.metalworking group and the
sci.engr.joining.welding groups. There are lots of people in the
metalworking group that know a lot about welding. And in general, the
metalworking group is larger, and has more people reading it. So when
someone has a question about welding, it's not surprising to see it cross
posted to these two groups. However, not everyone interested in
metalworking know, or care much, about welding. And most the ones that do,
already tend to read the welding group. So by cross posting to both, you
don't pick up that many more people interested in welding by posting to the
general metalworking group, but you do end up adding more traffic to the
metalworking group, for which a sizable percentage of posters don't care
that much about. Though you are more likely to get a question answered by
posting to both groups, it does Usenet more harm, by reducing the signal to
noise ratio - so I consider it act of selfishness to cross post like that -
even if the message is on topic in both groups.

Second, thread topics tend to drift. If when the topic of the first post
is valid for any of 5 groups, there are different groups for a reason - the
reason being that they tend to discuss different subjects. Your thread
could start out talking about a subject which was on topic in all, but
quickly drift to a topic that's off topic in all but one. Now if everyone
were an advanced, and courteous Usenet user, and trimmed groups as the
topic drifted, that would not be as bad, but most people don't, and the
result is long off-topic threads. So even if your cross post was half on
topic, you can't control what's going to happen afterwards.

I do agree that follow-up is nearly as bad as cross posting in the first
place. It causes threads to fragment, and causes people to post a
follow-up into a group they don't even read (and only realize what's
happened after the fact).

Cross-posting should only be used in very rare exceptions, like when
posting an announcement, where there's a group only for the announcements,
and where there's another group set up for any followup discussion about an
announcement. Or for example making a broadcast announcement to a group
hierarchy letting all the groups know about a change (or proposed change)
to the hierarchy. You should also include text in you message explaining
that you are using the Followup-to header so people don't post without
realizing they will have to go to a different group if they want to
participate in the discussion.

Cross posting SHOULD NEVER BE USED TO INCREASE THE ODDS OF GETTING AN
ANSWER TO A QUESTION, or for forcing more people to read your message. You
are abusing Usenet if that's your motivation for cross posting.

On the few rare exceptions of where cross posting is justified, Followup-To
is almost always required, and the right thing to do should be obvious. If
you find yourself cross posting, and there's not an obvious place to set
Followup-to, then that's simply a sign that you shouldn't have cross posted
in the first place.

Cross posting is almost always a selfish act that does more harm to the
quality of Usenet, than it does good for the poster. It shows you care
more about yourself, then about the people you are asking advice from. And
when looking for free advice from strangers, that's a fairly rude thing to
do.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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