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From: wjh@wayback.UUCP (Bill Hery)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Unwanted postings
Message-ID: <1197@wayback.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Sep-87 09:56:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: wayback.1197
Posted: Wed Sep 16 09:56:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Sep-87 13:48:41 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Whippany, NJ
Lines: 53

First, an apology:

I recently responded to an article in net.music.misc about jazz; the article
was cross posted to several news groups (including net.misc) and I neglected 
to edit the newsgroup line to include only the relevant newsgroups.  I have
seen enough other cross posted followups to be aware of this problem in
general and offer my apologies to the readers of net.misc for my
carelessness.  I should have known better.

Next a suggestion:

Wouldn't it be better if the software for following up an article defaulted
to only the current newsgroup and actively asked if you really wanted to
reply in all the other newsgroups?  In looking through news.misc today (I
don't subscribe), I noticed a large number of cross posted followups that
did not belong here, and I suspect that most would not have been here with
the mechanism I propose.  Certainly mine wouldn't have been.

And another suggestion:

The original posting was probably cross posted because there is no
appropriate home for jazz articles.  rec.music.misc is dominated by rock in
its myriad forms, and has so much traffic that it discourages jazz fans from
subscribing.  Periodically, there is a move to establish a rec.music.jazz,
but even though there are usually many postings in support there is
apparantly not enough to get a group started.  This is partly a chicken and
egg problem: many potential supporters of a jazz group don't bother reading
a rock newsgroup.  Other musical genres have faced a similar problem, with a
few (classical, folk) getting newsgroups, and others (jazz, c&w, easy
listening) not.  How about having a rock newsgroup, so music.misc can really
cover what seems to be the miscellania of the musical interests of the
usenet readers?

And last, a complaint:

Not surprisingly, I got a few email complaints about my cross posting.  No
complaint--I knew about the problem, but still needed a reminder.  One,
however I considered to be extremely rude and infantile:

>  Please keep this jazz crud out of news.misc!
>  -- 
>  Larry Campbell                                The Boston Software Works, Inc.
>  Internet: campbell@maynard.bsw.com          120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109
>  uucp: {husc6,mirror,think}!maynard!campbell         +1 617 367 6846

If Mr. Campbell is referring to jazz as crud, I think his narrow mindedness
is obvious.  If he thinks my article was crud, I would be glad to hear and
respond to specific complaints about the content of the article; in fact I
would love to see more dialog on jazz appearing on the net.

He did say please, so maybe he is to be forgiven for remaining rudeness.

Bill Hery