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From: fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.notes
Subject: Re: Information Overload and What We Can Do About It
Message-ID: <10551@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 5-Oct-85 10:45:29 EDT
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Posted: Sat Oct  5 10:45:29 1985
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In article <126@sdencore.UUCP> mark@sdencore.UUCP (Mark DiVecchio) writes:
>
>One simple step, which has to have been suggested before, is prohibit
>posting the same message to multiple newsgroups.

No, no, no! What you are suggesting is the removal of useful information.
What I have been suggesting is the addition of useful information to the
headers of netnews articles, and software in the user-interfaces to make
use of the information. One such piece of information is the list of news
groups that an article was posted into.

Besides, multiple posting allows someone to clearly mark an article as
being of interest to more than one interest group. I cross posted the
original article in this chain to net.news and net.news.notes, because
I was discussing interface and information issues that involve both
software systems (and communities).

Further, disallowing cross posting will not discourage the practice; it
will just remove useful filtering information from the header(s), when
people post several separate copies of the same thing to several
newsgroups. In the current scheme, I save disk space (on UNIX systems
running netnews, only one copy of this article is around, although it
appears in two newsgroups), and users who have read it in one
newsgroup, will not have to read it again provided that their
user-interface is sufficiently clever (most of them are, these days).

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU


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