Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!welty
From: welty@steinmetz.ge.com (richard welty)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Wish List re: Crossposting
Message-ID: <10960@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 23 May 88 19:43:21 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> <9352@e.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: welty@steinmetz.UUCP (richard welty)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 98

In article <9352@e.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes:
>In article <10879@steinmetz.ge.com> welty@steinmetz.UUCP (richard welty) writes:
>*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.

And as I recall, I was pretty far up there myself ... gack.

>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.

I never claimed that crossposting was bad per se.  I argued that
crossposting is a feature that is heavily abused, and proposed curbs
on it in order to eliminate some of the more flagrant abuses.
If no changes are made to the current crossposting system, then abuses
will continue, because a large percentage of the news readership
will remain ignorant of proper behavior.  Nothing you can do outside
of altering news itself will eliminate some of the abuses.

... various examples of crossposting flame wars omitted, as we agree
that they happen ...

>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.

Well, I agree that a strict hierarchical organization has several
obvious problems.  The question is whether some set of restrictions
might solve some current problems.  As long as a reasonable way of
coercing Pnews (or whatever) into allowing the behaviour when you really
want it exists, I still believe that some simple restrictions on
crossposting would do much, much more good than harm.

>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.

Well, yes, but the only way to control this is either for site
administrators to jump on their users or for changes to the software
to make abuse harder.

>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.

... other examples of abuse omitted ...

>Or any of a number of other things that I basically ignore and
>am glad that we no longer pay money to get.

well, yeah, but this string of articles is about crossposting,
and these examples, fine ones though they be, have nothing to do
with crossposting.

>And yes, flame fests are annoying.  But flame fests are annoying
>whether or not they are cross-posted.

Yeah, but there'd be a damn site fewer of them if there were restrictions
on crossposting.

>Maybe you could tell me why you think cross-posting is evil
>in and of itself?

I never said this.  Since I never said this, and don't believe it,
I won't bother defending it.

>  And how does cross-posting encourage flame
>fests?

Gack.  I think that this has been addressed many times in many groups.

I'll give one example, since you've asked, but if you can't find
5 or 10 on a superficial search, you're not looking very hard.

Example:  Moron wants lyrics to I-hate-you song from stiv.  Crossposts
request to n (n>10) newsgroups, including rec.arts.startrek (the correct
group) and talk.bizarre (most assuredly not the correct newsgroup).
A flame war then follows where many many trekkies and bizarrites flame
at each other to get out of each others newsgroups.  A bloody unpleasant
mess, and throughly unnecessary.  It was rather compounded by a number
of individuals (on both sides of the fence) who enjoyed the obnoxious
affair and kept the pressure (and flamage) up.  Never would have happened
if it were hard to crosspost.  Wasted a lot of bandwidth.
-- 
Richard Welty  518-387-6346  GE R&D, K1-5C39, Niskayuna, New York
   welty@ge-crd.ARPA  {uunet,philabs,rochester}!steinmetz!welty
    ``I'm not making any of this up you know'' -- Anna Russell