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From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Just how useful is crossposting?
Message-ID: <1989Nov24.064411.4964@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 89 06:44:11 GMT
References: <47326@looking.on.ca> <838@ccssrv.UUCP> <1989Nov17.173753.9790@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> <854@ccssrv.UUCP>
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Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: U of Illinois, CS Dept., Systems Research Group
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perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison) writes:
>In article <1989Nov17.173753.9790@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> I write:
>+ perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison) writes:
>+ >To maximize compliance in the presence of older posting programs, the
>+ >originating transport program (e.g.  inews) could check for cross-postings
>+ >without a Followup-To: and insert one, specifying the first-listed newsgroup.
>+ ACK! Not only do we have a bogus requirement that only one group
>+ contain followups, but we get to engage in gratuitous header
>+ rewriting to enforce it.
>Who said anything about REwriting headers?  I specified the _originating_
>transport, i.e. the first one to see the article, i.e. the one on the
>poster's system; and only the _addition_ of a Followup-To: if it were
>missing from a cross-posted article.

Duh. I was obviously not reading what I was replying to. Mea culpa,
and I apologise.

This doesn't fix the problem, though. If you don't rewrite headers,
then bozos can still crosspost all over the place to their heart's
content, as long as _their_ system doesn't have a fixed inews. And
they can omit followup-to lines. Of course, the inews at your site
could fix new postings, but the damage is done by this point. In any
case, I wouldn't fix my inews to do this without an RFC mandate of
it, and I'd be busily lobbying against it if someone proposed it.
I have a feeling lots of others agree --- it's hard enough to get
people to do what the RFCs mandate, much less go beyond them.

>+ Crosspostings are a feature, not a bug. They decrease the amount of
>+ time readers have to spend chasing all over the namespace trying to
>+ find the articles they're interested in. I ask again: what problem
>+ exactly are you (those trying to modify crossposting) trying to
>+ solve?
>One recent example occurred in comp.os.minix.  A question regarding minix
>on an IBM PC was crossposted to comp.os.minix and comp.sys.ibm.pc.  I don't
>remember the topic, but I think the original crossposting was appropriate.
>The problem was that the followup thread ended up having nothing at all to
>do with minix, but it was still there because the followup authors weren't
>editing the Newsgroups.

This is an inapproprate group problem, IMHO. Yes, it _does_ happen
all the time, but that's because many people are careless. In a
world without crossposting, the original question might have been
multiposted to comp.os.minix and comp.sys.ibm.pc. Then followup
discussions might have begun in both groups. That makes things
difficult on both interested readers and the original poster.

On the other hand, what if the question was originally posted,
under your scheme, to comp.os.minix,comp.sys.ibm.pc. The Followup-To:
line, by default, would then be comp.os.minix. Then: interested
c.s.ibm.pc readers would follow up into c.os.minix, a group they
might not even read. To follow the discussion, they have to start
reading minix. This is a good thing iff the discussion quickly
becomes useful for only one group. Sometimes, like in this case,
if does, but in others it never settles down to a one-group issue.
Then the proposed solution causes more trouble then it solves.

--John

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John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
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