Ultrasonic

Korben Dallas wrote: [...] Hey, noone in here likes multiposting. Please cross-post for the future.

I've always heard it was the other way around. Are you sure?

That's why I multi'd instead of cross-posted.

The courtesy advantage to cross-posting is that people subscribed to multiple groups will only have to read a message once (provided they have a competent newsreader).

NO, you are misreading.

There is little good to cross-posting. Rare is the time when it really fits the posting, and you either clutter up the newsgroups with people who have seen it in another one, or you post to disparate newsgroups that result in an awful lot of junk because different newsgroups are responding to people not in the group.

Take note that up till ten years ago, has it really been that long?, there was only sci.electronics and sci.electronics.repair Dividing the former up was campaigned for, and voted on successfully, resulting in the multiple sub newsgroups we see today. This was to subdivide the discussions, and there's no point in that if people are cross-posting on a routine basis.

But as bad as cross-posting is, multi-posting is even worse. Suddenly you are using up more resource, since the messages take up space for each newsgroup you post it to. And you get multiple threads going, and surely many of the participants have seen it already in another newsgroup. Any benefit, as dubious as there is a benefit to cross-posting, of cross-posting is lost, since you do not get the multi-discipline that would be the point of cross-posting.

Cross-posting is usually laziness, with the poster unwilling to figure out the most appropriate newsgroup. This is reinforced with multiple posting, because it shows off the shotgun approach to posting; hit enough of them and you'll get an answer. You aren't interested in hearing the interaction of different groups, you want an answer and figure you'll get one the more newsgroups you hit.

Multiple posting should never happen. Cross-posting should happen rarely. Nobody should default to cross-posting (though there are people like that) and one should think very carefully before doing so.

If one isn't sure of the best newsgroup, they should be reading that newsgroup for a bit to see if it fits. And if it turns out to be the wrong newsgroup, one can always ask somewhere else later. (Note that's not the same thing as posting to different newsgroups at the same time with the same message.)

Read Mark Zenier's guide to the hierarchy at: ftp://ftp.eskimo.com/u/m/mzenier/seguide9706.txt

Michael

And if they're reading the groups using any reasonably modern news client, that argument is utterly meaningless, since most (if not all) of such readers automatically deal with "Oh - You already saw that message and marked it as read over on alt.some.group. No need to show it again when you click over to alt.some.other.group where it was cross-posted."

It's rare indeed when a single newsgroup can be said to be "The One True Place" for a particular discussion. Like a face-to-face conversation, the discussions grow and change, moving away from the topic of the newsgroup, and back to it, and away again, as time goes by. It's the nature of the beast. You wouldn't start a real life conversation about... Oh, let's say horses and horsemanship for an example... in one room, but then stop everything dead in its tracks and move everybody involved in it to another room before continuing because something in the conversation brought electronic stopwatches and their use or repair into the picture, would you? Likewise, I'm not going to stop the conversation that got going in rec.equestrian and not continue unless it gets moved to sci.electronics.stopwatches.repair just because my horse-based thread forked off a sub-conversation on changing the batteries in the stopwatch I use for timing my run through a horse-jumping course.

On the other hand, if the conversation is clearly migrating from the realm of horses to pure stopwatch repair, then it makes sense to move the conversation from that point into sci.electronics.stopwatches.repair.

On this point, we agree - Multi-posting is usually, if not always, bad form, a waste of effort, and a resource hog.

You say this as though it were a bad thing...

Dunno about anyone else, but I could care less about "interaction of different groups" when I need an answer - I want the answer, and if I'm turning to a usenet group to find it, I probably need it as quickly as I can get it after not being able to find it by other methods. Likewise, I probably have no interest in "interaction of different groups" - only the answer to my question. So if I can't find it for myself via other methods, I "shotgun" the question to a small handful of groups that seem to be most relevant to the subject of the question in hopes of stumbling across the person who has the answer and will post it in reply. Unfortuately, that's about the best that can be done, since a specialized topic frequently has either no "proper" group for the question to be asked in at all, or if such a "proper" group exists, it's frequently low-to-no traffic due to being so specialized.

A real-world exmple: A few weeks ago, I needed a torque specification for a bolt on my car. There *IS NO* newsgroup that's specific to my car. Google gave me way too much irrelevant cruft to even try to wade through. Lycos gave me nothing. Other web searches came up similarly empty. So I posted my question, crossing it to about 4 different automotive groups, and had the exact answer I needed about 10 mintues later when someone who knew the answer hit my posting in one of those groups. Which group did he see it on? I don't know. And I don't care. But he saw it, and was able to give me (and anyone else who might have been interested) the answer.

Care to tell me what the most appropriate newsgroup would be for my question?

OK, now that you've said it's "some.car.repair.group", what about the fact that none of the three separate news servers (all quite good, but none of them being of the "We carry every group that's ever been newgrouped since the beginning of Usenet" persuasion) my ISP provides access to carries "some.car.repair.group"? Presumably, under your "rules", that means I'm not permitted to post my question at all, since I have no access to what you have determined is "The One Right Group"?

Dude, you need the mental equivalent of a good sized bowl of bran flakes.

Whoops, sorry... Guess I should have taken this post over to alt.jeeze.some.people.are.anal in order to keep things properly segregated, eh?

Korben Dallas top-posted:

future.

Here are your 2 parallel threads:

No one is 1 thread has any idea what someone responding to the other thread has said. They can't correct errors and they can't tell when the question has been properly answered.

You also need to get a handle on not top-posting.