Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Just how useful is crossposting?
Message-ID: <47326@looking.on.ca>
Date: 14 Nov 89 07:17:31 GMT
Organization: Looking Glass Software Limited, Waterloo ON
Lines: 29
Class: query

I have come to wonder if crossposting is all that useful in discussion
groups.  On ClariNet, I use it a lot for news articles, where wire items
that cover multiple topics are posted to multiple groups.

But for discussion, I have begun to doubt the value.  Even if a base
article does cover multiple group topics, the whole discussion almost never
does.   And nobody bothers with followup-to headers.

In fact, it just seems to get annoying.   In addition, we get the annoying
"posting to a zillion groups" by people who think they should get as many
people as possible to read their articles rather than attempting to classify
them well.

Other than for news items classified in a semi-regular manner, I have come
to doubt the value of crossposting.   Yes, it does save disk space, and if
you believe that crossposting is going to happen anyway, you might as well
save the disk space, and allow readers to show the article only once.

But on other systems (Usenet is the only one I know of that supports
cross-posting so extensively) I just don't see much manual crossposting.
(ie. posting N times to N groups)  In fact, I see manual crossposting on
USENET even more than I see it elsewhere.  Am I alone in this?

I would think that perhaps if an original article is crossposted, we should
get down to it and insist the followups be in one group.  That should either
be a group picked in a followup-to line, or the first group, or followers-up
should be asked to pick which of the groups they are going to reply within.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473