Re: Which Digital SLR - Canon 350 D / Olympus E300 / Pentax *ist

On Sat, 25 Mar 2006 11:02:53 +1200, Colin D <ColinD@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



maxsilverstar@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

<snip>
You may frown on posting to more than two groups, but the Usenet community
generally agrees that the proper limit is five groups. And where you suggest the
OP multipost, I think you meant to say crosspost? The reason you gave to support
crossposting (if, as I think, that is what you meant to say) is certainly valid,
but I think the best reason for crossposting is readers can avoid seeing the
same post repeatedly in subsequent groups, assuming they have set their
newsreader to ignore all but the first posting encountered.

<more snip>

Yes, you are right, I did mean crosspost. My apologies for the slip.
No need to apologize for the slip - we're all so used to reading and mentally
editing messages with far more slips and typos that I doubt anyone reading your
post was any more confused than I was, and as you have affirmed I understood
what you meant to say. If I weren't writing about other statements in your post
I would just have assumed my understanding was correct and wouldn't have asked
you for confirmation, but since I was already writing I thought I might as well
ask you to nail down this point.

Your reply got me interested in looking up rules on multiposting and
crossposting. The charter of this group says nothing about either, except to say
that general Usenet guidelines should be followed. So I went reading through the
news.admin.* groups, and learned that the number I gave was far too low, at
least for unmoderated groups and some hierarchies. To determine which posts are
excessive enough for administrators to call for cancellation, a formula called
the Breidbart Index is used. The FAQ maintainer at
news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins says that a BI up to 20 over a 45 day period is
allowable. That's a huge number of posts. For the way computation is done please
see the FAQ in the referenced news group. The FAQ maintainer points out that a
single post not repeated over two or more days "..cannot be cancellable - to
reach a BI of 20, it would have to be cross-posted to 400 groups." He also says
"This author recommends one posting cross-posted to no more than 10 groups, no
more often than once every two weeks (a BI of 3)." BTW, for purposes of
cancellation by Usenet administrators, no distinction is made between
multiposting and crossposting, although it's clear that multiposting is always
frowned upon.

About two groups or five groups, the general consensus in the rec.photo.
groups seems to be two, but in the broader usenet community, and in some
less technical areas it may well be five. In the technical groups,
which are the only groups I follow, two seems the figure, probably since
there aren't five separate groups with a common interest component.
Where do you get these numbers from? As I've noted, there is nothing in the
charter on this. Hierarchies (and moderated groups) can indeed set their own
limits, but individuals are not free to dictate such limits once a group is
chartered, nor would a vote of users on this one point in any unmoderated group
be valid. And without such a vote, otherwise useless though it would be, how can
you possibly know what the consensus in the rec.photo.* groups (and other
'technical' groups) is?

BTW, I can easily think of an article that would be on-topic in this and four or
more other groups. If you want me to I'll provide an example.

All
the cross-posted posts I have seen in the rec.photo. groups which
contain several groups are in fact cross-posted to totally irrelevant -
and usually frivolous - groups. Most of the posters in 'my' groups have
their filters set to reject posts with more than two.

If posts are made to truly irrelevant groups, those posts are off-topic, and in
violation of 'general Usenet guidelines'. Personally, I killfilter anyone who
initiates an off-topic thread in any of the groups I read (my killfilter file is
huge), but I'm much more tolerant when threads drift off-topic, like this one
has.

And again, how can you possibly know what the filters of "most of the posters in
'my' groups" are set to? I know that such information isn't in the headers, so
have you written to (and gotten answers from) 'most of the posters'? Are you
perhaps claiming extra-sensory powers? Let's run a test - you tell me what
filters I have set in just this one group, except for the one universal one I
implied in my previous post. I promise to admit it if you are right, and as an
adult, which I have been for more than 40 years, I have *never* not honored my
promises.

Of course, multi-posting gets around those filters while still posting
in numerous groups, so that is an additional pointer to the possibility
that a multi-poster is trolling.

No, that's not a 'pointer', much less an 'additional pointer'. It could simply
be that the poster doesn't know the rules, or doesn't care. There are probably
other possibilities as well. When I got started on the 'Net more than ten years
ago I read everything I could find about how to use it properly, and then
discovered over the years that huge numbers of posters had not bothered to
inform themselves similarly. Of course it is always possible that the OP was
trolling, but nothing you or he has written has persuaded me of that.

If the OP in this thread is indeed genuine, then my remarks to him are
not valid, but you have to say that his post had the hallmarks of a
troll.

No, I most assuredly *don't* "have to say that his post had the hallmarks of a
troll". I don't agree with your assertion at all. I think I've explained why,
both in this post and in my previous post (the one you've responded to).

I apologize to everyone reading this for saying that the limit on crossposts was
five groups. Mea culpa.

I also apologize to everyone for lurching off-topic in this thread. Mea maxima
culpa.

Now, besides reading your and others' replies to this or my previous post in
this thread, I believe the only other thing I need to do is to try to figure out
where I got the 'five posts' limit I asserted before. I guess I read it
somewhere, but I have no idea where. It will likely take me a long time to find
the article where I found that number, if it even exists. Maybe, like so many
other participants in Usenet, I made it up. After all, we're all human. We are
all humans here, aren't we?

Colin D.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Crossposting
    ... >>>Thereby depriving others of useful responses that may be posted in different ... >Multiposting is *inherently* bad, ... >Crossposting was initially developed to provide a facility to ... No, don't bother,thanks, because I neither cross-post, nor in general ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: IE does not open the set default mail client after instlalling Windows Live Mail
    ... Thank you for the definition of crossposting vs multiposting. ... these newsgroups, some of which were rather negative responses, like a slap ... was because I didn't see a response to my original post in WLM. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie6.browser)
  • Re: Correct way to control alias of a NIC interface from application running as non-root
    ... who see it twice can just ignore it when they see it second time. ... usage on the news-servers and less bandwidth usage to the newreader (some ... If person in group B had seen the reply in group A via crossposting, ... Anyway thanks for ur reply and suggestions about multiposting. ...
    (comp.os.linux.networking)
  • Re: Multiposting vs crossposting
    ... Multiposting is posting the same message over and over again. ... BLAH BLAH BLAH ... Crossposting is posting to multiple groups. ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.adonet)
  • Re: SHM NG
    ... medieval themes with which we are all familiar we are left with our ... of new posters that have not been able to partake ... that this group deals with medieval history, ... When you answer something that's crossposted, kill the crossposting ...
    (soc.history.medieval)
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