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.