Re: Enlightenment

David Friedman <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The problem with that is that any particular poster doesn't know
where other people are reading it. So if I decide to trim the
newsgroup list to just the one I am reading, my post gets missed
by some of the people who were in the conversation.

True.

On January 18th, Mark Atwood crossposted a message he thought would
be of interest to rasff, rasfw, and rasfc. And very likely, it was.
Unfortunately, it attracted crossposted replies, which attracted more
replies, and here were are, two months and 9000 replies later, and
topic drift has rendered nearly all of the replies off topic in rasfw
and rasfc. (Nothing is off topic in rasff.)

Many people do trim to rasff, rasfw, or both. But not everyone does.
And in a sort of Darwinian selection, the most crossposted messages
tend to get the most replies, and those replies are, of course,
usually crossposted.

The same happened when I crossposted a message between rasff and
alt.usage.english on July 1st of last year. The result was over
17,000 crosspoted followups, lasting until mid-December.

One alternative is to do what I do--set your filters so that if a
post appears in two groups you read, you only see it in one of them.

I thought that's how all newsreaders have always been configured. In
fact, it's precisely because of that that it's recommended that if you
have something to say that's of interest in more than one newsgroup,
that you crosspost it rather than posting it separately to each one.
With crossposting, people subscribed to more than one of those groups
will see it only once.

However, I think that may be a mistake. In other words, it's better
to cause people to see one message two or three times than to cause
one or more newsgroups to be flooded with thousands of off-topic
messages.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Send
    ... microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support and received several replies. ... Please do not send the same message separately to more than one newsgroup. ... Don't do it by multiposting - sending it separately to different newsgroups, ... Though in some cases it might be appropriate to crosspost to one or two related groups, as a general practice you should not crosspost every message. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Send
    ... microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support and received several replies. ... Please do not send the same message separately to more than one newsgroup. ... Don't do it by multiposting - sending it separately to different newsgroups, ... Though in some cases it might be appropriate to crosspost to one or two related groups, as a general practice you should not crosspost every message. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Kaspersky Security Suite v6
    ... There was no crosspost in alt.comp.virus. ... Because kenny made two separate posts (one in each newsgroup), ... no-one in acv will see replies from aca-v and vice versa, ...
    (alt.comp.anti-virus)
  • Re: Whats the proper Netiquette?
    ... And dont you dare misspell anything. ... The way I see it, when you enter a newsgroup, you enter with a loaded ... somehow manage to crosspost to EVERY newsgroup, ... Always top post, middle post and bottom post, everything you say to ...
    (alt.home.repair)
  • Re: Whats the proper Netiquette?
    ... And dont you dare misspell anything. ... The way I see it, when you enter a newsgroup, you enter with a loaded ... somehow manage to crosspost to EVERY newsgroup, ... Always top post, middle post and bottom post, everything you say to ...
    (alt.home.repair)
Loading