jeff@rtech.UUCP (Jeff Lichtman) (06/19/85)
This is a plea to all USENET users to keep things in their
appropriate newsgroups. Lately two types of cross-postings have been
happening:
1) A well-meaning person posts a message to several newgroups which
only belongs in one of them. For instance, someone posted a
message about affirmative action as it relates to women in both
net.politics and net.women. This topic would have been fine in
either newsgroup by itself, but the topic quickly changed to
whether affirmative action is justified at all. Many messages
which belonged only in net.politics showed up in net.women as
well.
2) Some twit in net.flame uses the "Follow-up To:" line to route
his or her opponents comebacks to other newsgroups. For example,
someone routed to net.micro.mac an argument which had deteriorated
into verbal abuse.
USENET runs on an honor system. There are few ways to enforce the
rules that exist for USENET as a whole and for each newsgroup. Besides,
there are many ways to abuse the system which don't break any written rules.
Therefore, I am asking that people take greater care when cross-posting.
Some things to think about before cross-posting are:
Will one of the newsgroups come to dominate the conversation, thus
filling the other newsgroups with unwanted messages?
Will the opinions commonly expressed in each of the newsgroups
offend the readers of any of the other newsgroups?
Will the topic of conversation stay the same as in the original
message, or will it drift into areas inappropriate to one or more
of the newsgroups?
Am I doing something in fun or as a means of revenge that will
inconvenience and annoy thousands of people?
Please remember every time you post that you have the power to
contribute to the decline of the quality of conversation on USENET. If
we don't all discipline ourselves, the whole system could eventually
become useless.
--
Jeff Lichtman at rtech (Relational Technology, Inc.)
aka Swazoo Koolak
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