Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: Wish List re: Crossposting Message-ID: <9352@e.ms.uky.edu> Date: 20 May 88 22:10:53 GMT References: <439@bacchus.DEC.COM> <52859@sun.uucp> <9879@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6075@sigi.Colorado.EDU> <1107@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <9297@e.ms.uky.edu> <10879@steinmetz.ge.com> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 81 In article <10879@steinmetz.ge.com> welty@steinmetz.UUCP (richard welty) writes: >In article <9297@e.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes: >>There's been a number of times when I've been requesting some >>information, the answer to which could have been found in any of a >>number of groups, some of which I don't read and have no interest in >>reading. But I still want this information. What I do is cross-post >>to everywhere applicable, point out that I don't read a particular >>group, and that responses should be mailed. >And you may be unaware of how many news readers dislike this sort of >thing. In talking to various heavy readers, I find that such postings >are generally among their pet peeves. They aren't quite as annoyed >if the poster offers to summarize, though. The fact that I find this >annoying is one of the reasons I am careful to subscribe to a group >for a week or so before I post to it. *I* am a "heavy" (but losing weight) news reader. In fact, you may remember that recent posting giving the 300 some odd most common lines in somebody's /usr/spool/news. Of the 4 posters from Kentucky, my roomate was the 1st one mentioned and I was the second -- the other two were close friends. I do offer to summarize, but generally don't find cross-posting to be a problem. (Like I said before). Any system can be misused and I think you're really complaining about misuses rather than faults in the system itself. >>Seriously, I've never understood why some people are so violently >>opposed to cross-posting. Only rarely does it get out of hand, >>and it's a useful feature to have. >It gets out of hand a *great* deal in some groups I read, and can be >quite obnoxious if two groups really go after each other (witness the >recent rec.bicycles/rec.autos flame war over right of way and responsible >behaviour in traffic) Or the flame wars between sys.amiga and sys.atari.st? Or between motorola people and intel people and nsc people? Or between SysV and BSD people? Religious arguments happen all the time. You won't be able to stop that. By limiting cross-posting you take away some potentially very useful conversations. The newsgroup hiearchy *cannot* be a good fit to the topics that are discussable. The questions is "what is *really* getting 'out of hand'"? Is it the way people are using the net? *That* is what I see is getting out of hand. I see bunches of people running around playing games basically, but the games are disrupting other people and costing places money. For instance. comp.theory.self-org-sys (or whatever the name is) has no traffic. Recently a bizarre-oid posted a message claiming it as his newsgroup, unless somebody came along and took it from him. Or the newgroup which went out for misc.vogon-news recently. Or the fella at penn-state that's posting things in "talk.ru" from time to time. (I don't know if that one is getting out, but it sometimes causes the majority of traffic in "junk" on this machine). Or any of a number of other things that I basically ignore and am glad that we no longer pay money to get. And yes, flame fests are annoying. But flame fests are annoying whether or not they are cross-posted. Maybe you could tell me why you think cross-posting is evil in and of itself? And how does cross-posting encourage flame fests? -- <---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <---- SKA: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- <---- Goodbye RAH.