CROSS-POSTING, OR MULTI-POSTING, OR NEITHER?

As you can see from the header, this post is cross-posted to four
groups, for a reason.

I am seeing an increasing number of posts being multi-posted in two or
more of the above groups. Cross-posting is itself annoying enough, but
at least the contributors appear in all groups, whereas multi-posted
messages have different replies according to the particular group, and a
post in one group does not appear in the others. If one is
participating in a multi-posted group, it gets tedious as well as
annoying to find the same post in each group just to stay with the
message flow.

I think multi- and cross-posting is a shot-gun approach to posting and
should be banned.

What's the netiquette or group charter position on this? Should we not
reply to these cross/multi posts? - except this one, of course {

Colin D.

 

If it makes sense to cross post then cross post. OTOH think hard if it
really makes sense. Most things don't.

Nick

 

I can only speak for myself, but this is what I do. - I don't look at the
header at all. If a post interests me enough such that I compose a reply,
then I make my reply, and simply click on, "send". I presume it will get to
the original poster. Should I eliminate any of the groups, then I don't know
if it will.
This could be eliminated if everyone posted under a real, legitimate
email address as I do. Many, however, seem to have a fear of that, and for
some reason or other, insist on using email addresses that are somehow
shrouded in mystery. Perhaps these people like to think that they are agents
of the CIA, or some such thing.
In any case, since I can't post to the originator of the message
directly, I have little choice but to send my post to every group on his
list, so that is what I do.

 

Charter don't matter; those who wanna multi or x-post will do so and if
you ask 'em to stop, some will become righteous and do it all the more.
Others will X-post just to be irksome to those who haven't learned to
filter or kill threads. Setting followups is logical, but also can set
some folks off. Cross posting is infinitely better than multi posting in
my book, but both are abused.

The thing that may most delimit garbage is totally ignoring X-posted
garbage, or at least trimming out groups that have zero relationship to
photos.

Now, as to putting Subject Lines in all caps......

<s.>

 

William:

If you thought of the post in terms of not so much as going to the
original sender, but to lots of people who read each of the groups,
perhaps that'd motivate you to examine where it's going. It'd help a lot
of people if you did. The OP should be following each of the groups to
which he posts; therefor trimming out extraneous groups is highly valued
by ..... the rest of the group who now don't have to read about politics
in the photo groups, for example.

cordially,

john mcwilliams

 

There is very good reason to not post your email address to Usenet.
Especially if you use a permanent long term email address. I generally keep
my email addresses for many years. The junk unsolicited emails and Spam
that are generated by just one Usenet posting are not worth it when one
simply want to make a comment, and/or participate in a Usenet discussion,
with absolutely zero requirement of personal email exchanges...

 

Nick wrote on Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:18:01 -0500:

NZ> In rec.photo.equipment.35mm Colin D
??>>
??>> What's the netiquette or group charter position on this?
??>> Should we not reply to these cross/multi posts? - except
??>> this one, of course {
??>>
NZ> If it makes sense to cross post then cross post. OTOH
NZ> think hard if it really makes sense. Most things don't.

For myself, if I notice something is cross-posted, I ignore it.
I wish it were possible to define a rule in OE that would do
that automatically but such is not the case. More's the pity, I
don't think I'd miss much!

James Silverton.

 

And since you have such strong views, what do you think about SHOUTING?

 

Crosspost if necessary; it usually isn't, but sometimes it makes sense.
Choose the smallest possible number of groups. Crossposting to try to
reach more people doesn't make sense; people *do* read more than one group.

Multi-posting is stupid, bad, and should never be done. It's spam.

 

You have just demonstrated that cross-posting is *not*
intrinsically wrong. It can, however, be abused: cross-posting
to newsgroups where the message is inappropriate is an abuse and
is worse than simply posting an off topic message to a single
newsgroup.

Multi-posting is inherently an abuse itself, whether the message
is on topic or not. Multi-posting should be avoided.

(And, note that topicality and netiquette are on topic in any
newsgroup. Cross-posting to a small selection of related
newsgroups is acceptable for such topics. Hence this thread is
quite appropriate.)

True, and it is an annoying abuse.

Broadening the base of discussion is *precisely* the purpose of
cross-posting. It is not annoying *in* *itself*, and is a very
reasonable thing to do _when_ _appropriate_.

Wrong, and absolutely illogical! Multi-posting *is* banned!
People do it anyway (rarely out of any intent to be annoying,
but instead simply because they don't know the difference).

Cross-posting is beneficial when used appropriately; like
everything else in the world it can be abused, and that abuse
*is* banned... but people do it anyway. Granted that a great
deal of cross-posting abuse is in fact done with the very
purpose of annoying others, but still even with cross-posting
abuse it is mostly done in ignorance.

The group charter is irrelevant.

Netiquette is do not ever multi-post and do not ever post (or
worse, cross-post) original articles to newsgroups where the
message (topic) is not appropriate.

Replying to multi-posted articles is hardly a problem, though I
suppose one reasonable response would be to cross-post the
response as appropriate.

Replying to cross-posted articles confuses many people; in
particular there is a problem with setting Followup-To headers.
While it is *clearly* an abuse to start an inappropriately
cross-posted thread, once it has been started if the thread is
actually of any value at all there is no way to narrow the
distribution without potentially cutting off some readers who
are following the thread. In particular it is offensive to
silently add a Followup-To header without announcing it in the
text of the message, but even when announced it is poor form to
assume that others should subscribe to the particular newsgroup
selected by the sender.

Trying to "ban" abuse is a waste of time and effort. The only
recourse is effective use of filters/scoring/killfiles by
individual users. Note that on some newsgroups it *would* make
sense to just filter out everything that is cross-posted, though
it might on occasion delete a useful article. But generally
that is overkill because it will delete some useful articles.

Use of a "score" system, where a number of characteristics are
heuristically evaluated to form a decision that passes or fails
any given message is much preferred, and particularly so when it
is easy to manually manipulate it to add particular authors and
threads. Another nice feature is killing any thread that is
cross-posted to certain specific newsgroups (for example, to any
political discussion newsgroup).

 

From: "Colin D" <[email protected]>

| As you can see from the header, this post is cross-posted to four
| groups, for a reason.
|
| I am seeing an increasing number of posts being multi-posted in two or
| more of the above groups. Cross-posting is itself annoying enough, but
| at least the contributors appear in all groups, whereas multi-posted
| messages have different replies according to the particular group, and a
| post in one group does not appear in the others. If one is
| participating in a multi-posted group, it gets tedious as well as
| annoying to find the same post in each group just to stay with the
| message flow.
|
| I think multi- and cross-posting is a shot-gun approach to posting and
| should be banned.
|
| What's the netiquette or group charter position on this? Should we not
| reply to these cross/multi posts? - except this one, of course {
|
| Colin D.

Always Cross-Post. This way all News Groups gather the same responses rather than different
groups getting different responses. This way ALL benefit. just make sure that you are not
excessively Cross-Posting and only Cross-Post to relevant, On Topic, News Groups.

 

: As you can see from the header, this post is cross-posted to four
: groups, for a reason.
:
: I am seeing an increasing number of posts being multi-posted in two or
: more of the above groups. Cross-posting is itself annoying enough, but
: at least the contributors appear in all groups, whereas multi-posted
: messages have different replies according to the particular group, and a
: post in one group does not appear in the others. If one is
: participating in a multi-posted group, it gets tedious as well as
: annoying to find the same post in each group just to stay with the
: message flow.
:
: I think multi- and cross-posting is a shot-gun approach to posting and
: should be banned.
:
: What's the netiquette or group charter position on this? Should we not
: reply to these cross/multi posts? - except this one, of course {
:
: Colin D.
According to Australia's largest Internet provider:
Posting to 2 groups is permitted. Posting to more than 2 groups is not
condoned.
People who actually bother to abide by the laws and rules or their ISP (all
three of us), probably read this as absolute and make multiple posts to
avoid breaking the rules.

As much as it gets up people's noses, multi posting will continue just as
long as you can't cross post to more than 2 groups and stay inside the
rules.

 

Colin, I disagree, when it comes to X-Posting. If an article/question is
APPROPRIATE [emphasis mine] for multiple NGs, then I urge posters to X-Post to
those that apply. First, not all servers carry all NGs. Second, subscribers
might not read all groups. If an article is X-Posted, all of the replies will
follow the article, regardless of which NG they come from. It should also save
the OP time, by checking his/her article in one, and seeing all of the answers
to it.

With the two main Photoshop NGs, I encourage posters to X-Post to both, rather
than multi-post for the above reasons.

Hunt

PS, I trimmed the X-Post Newsgroups, as this particular server doesn't have
one in your list.

 

Of course. But if I am trying to reach the original poster, then what choice
do I have? The only way to be sure of that, is to send my answer to all the
groups on the header. Now, if you are suggesting that I don't answer cross
posted emails at all, then yes.....I could do that. And, in many cases I
don't answer such posts. But it does impose quite a restriction on me to
have to check out the headers of every post. The best thing to do would be
to find a program that automatically eliminates all cross posted messages,
so I wouldn't even read them to begin with. I don't know of any such
program, or how to do this with the software I have, which is Outlook
Express for Windows XP.

 

I have been using my real email address for over 10 years now, and I have no
problem eliminating the two dozen or so spam messages I get every day.....It
takes me all of 5 minutes or less......I guess everyone considers such
things to be of different importance, but to me, posting under my real name
and address is much more important than to let a 5 minute job interfere with
it.
For one thing, most of those two dozen spam messages are my own fault,
and did not come because I was using my real email address on newsgroups. -
They came about because I am going to URL's all the time trying to gather
information on different subjects, and many of these URL's collect my email
address and sell/give it to others who then try to sell stuff to me over the
email system. But I don't care. I can be walking down the street, and some
stranger on the other side of the street can yell, "Hey, you!! Would you
like to buy my car?!" All I have to do is say, "No!", or shake my head, or
just ignore him. He has a perfect right to approach me, and I certainly am
not going to hide my head in the sand for the rest of my life because of
that possibility. Also, my regular, "snail mail" box is chocked full of such
spam every day, and I can't do anything about that, either.
I guess it just depends on the kind of person you are. I am more
gregarious than most.

 

snip

snip


Using your valid email address increases the likelihood that some news group
poster will email you personally concerning a newsgroup discussion. This is
especially creepy.

 

I find the idea that it takes anyone 5 minutes to dump 20-30
emails astounding. If it took me longer than 10-15 seconds...
something would need fixing!

Why is that creepy? The idea that you would post something that
you wouldn't discuss in email is creepy!

 

Which more or less chucked your entire discussion!

Why not 1) remove that one group, and/or 2) shift to a server
that will accept cross-posts to groups that it does not carry
(and complain loudly about the ridiculous limitation to the
admin people at the server which rejects such articles).

As it is, you've cut yourself off from the majority of people
following this thread...

 

Well, I have an "after market" program called "Qurb" that separates out all
the spam, and sure, I can dump all these in 10 seconds or so....The problem
is, sometimes Qurb screws up, and it separates out something that I need to
read.....Usually a message about something I have ordered on line, that Qurb
can't tell is important to me. So, I peruse all the Qurb messages a bit more
than one normally would......Most are obvious deletes, but a few are worthy
of closer inspection.
The same thing is true of my snail mail. The spammers are very cleaver
at making the envelopes look like government checks, or personal mail, or
something that is, "Important", so I pretty well have to open all the
envelopes, or at least 50% of them. A couple of years ago, I got two checks
from a drug company that totaled about $500. I threw them away, because they
looked just like spam mail.....It was no end of trouble getting the company
to remake those checks.....

 

It's kind of creepy that you consider that creepy.

Real name; real address; more than a thousand spam emails per day; still doing
it after all these years.