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From: mbr@aoa.UUCP (Mark Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.notes
Subject: Re: Prohibition of postings to multiple groups - a bad idea
Message-ID: <317@aoa.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 8-Oct-85 23:45:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: aoa.317
Posted: Tue Oct  8 23:45:18 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Oct-85 14:22:08 EDT
References: <10381@ucbvax.ARPA> <3274@nsc.UUCP> <698@tpvax.fluke.UUCP> <3166@nsc.UUCP> <126@sdencore.UUCP> <312@aoa.UUCP> <196@pid.UUCP>
Reply-To: mbr@aoa.UUCP (Mark Rosenthal)
Organization: Adaptive Optics Assoc., Cambridge, Mass. USA
Lines: 28
Xref: watmath net.news:4037 net.news.notes:40
Summary: 

In article <196@pid.UUCP> pwd@pid.UUCP (Philip W. Dalrymple) responds to my
earlier article:
>
>I think that this comes from the notes sites which have a real problem with
>multiple newsgroups.  Would it be posible for the people who maintain the
>notes system to allow multiple newsgroups is there system.  

I think you've missed my point.  Even if it is possible for the poster to
identify an article posted to several groups as the same article, it is not
possible to force the poster to do so.  A malicious poster can always post the
same article to as many newsgroups as s/he wants, or even multiple times to
the same newsgroup, and we all are forced to read (or make some disposition
of it) as many times as it was posted.

A good example of such antisocial behavior are the recent articles by
tektronix!tekig3!tekadg!davidl entitled "Unix, Unixpeople, Usenix - from a
non-compunerd's point of view...".  These were all identical, and posted
to several different newsgroups, instead of being posted to net.flame where
it belonged.  There can be no reason for doing this other than to annoy
people on the net.

It happens.  Proposing to prevent a poster from posting a single article to
multiple newsgroups, as did the original article to which I was responding,
will just make it happen that much more often.
-- 

	Mark of the Valley of Roses
	...!{decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!aoa!mbr