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From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: multiple postings
Message-ID: <3074@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 13 Apr 89 16:25:45 GMT
References: <187@arc.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 22

In article <187@arc.UUCP> ken@arc.UUCP (Ken Stuart) writes:
>	It seems to me that the thing that would go the furthest
>towards cutting down the number of unnecessary USENET messages would
>be to alter the software to only allow posting a message to one group
>at a time.

That would be a disaster.  Crossposted articles are transmitted once;
under your scheme, if even one person on the net was intent on having
his/her article read in two groups, he/she would post it twice, thereby
INCREASING traffic.

Inappropriate crosspostings do tend to increase traffic by spreading
flame wars around, but the best way to improve this is increasing user
education about Followup-To lines and checking the Newsgroups header.

You're right that many of the common crosspostings make no sense, but
throwing out crossposting altogether is overkill.



-- 
-- Joe Buck	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck