In article , Jeff says...

I've been seeing rants like Jim's about not cross posting to other newsgroups

Rants?? RANTS!!? How could you POSSIBLY...

Oh. OK, never mind. They really are rants I guess.

The problem happens when the folks at alt.rv or whatever reply
to the original question. They never trim the ng list as a rule,
so their replies go to *all* the ngs the original requester
sent his query to.

So basically the folks being helpful (in this case rcm) have to
listen to all the other replies to the question. Granted they
could possibly be interested in the replies (probably not in
this case, if I had a threaded fastener question this would
be *the* place to go) but in that case a check of the original
message would show where it went out to (some even say, crossposted
to x, y, z as a favor if the posting was done one ng at a time)
so interested parties can follow the replies.

The problem with crossposting like that is it can rapidly degenerate
into a huge chain reaction with everyone replying to every other
ng. In this case it was inadvertent but often this is done to
troll ngs and excite some controversy. That RSJ guy did that
deliberately with the rv ng and his ISP canned him for it,
deliberate trolling that way (that guy would go back and
put other ngs *into* the header after they had been trimmed out)
is frequently against ISP policy. Because of the fuss and
traffic it causes.

Go back and look, there are a lot of 'tiny brass screw posts'
here now. Most of them are replies from other ngs that show
up here because the 'post to' line was never trimmed.
(rant finis!)

Jim

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