ken@arc.UUCP (Ken Stuart) (04/13/89)
It seems to me that the thing that would go the furthest
towards cutting down the number of unnecessary USENET messages would
be to alter the software to only allow posting a message to one group
at a time.
For example, it is unnecessary to post something to both
ba.tiddlywinks
and also
ca.tiddlywinks
since if it is for all of California, then that includes the
bay area. This is simple. Things don't need to go to both news.admin
and news.misc. It seems to me that the groups are well designed NOT
to overlap.
Is this possible, software-wise, oh USENET gurus?
(I guess that the people who post their messages to ten groups
never read these messages!).
--
Thanks,
Ken Stuartjbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (04/13/89)
In article <187@arc.UUCP> ken@arc.UUCP (Ken Stuart) writes: > It seems to me that the thing that would go the furthest >towards cutting down the number of unnecessary USENET messages would >be to alter the software to only allow posting a message to one group >at a time. That would be a disaster. Crossposted articles are transmitted once; under your scheme, if even one person on the net was intent on having his/her article read in two groups, he/she would post it twice, thereby INCREASING traffic. Inappropriate crosspostings do tend to increase traffic by spreading flame wars around, but the best way to improve this is increasing user education about Followup-To lines and checking the Newsgroups header. You're right that many of the common crosspostings make no sense, but throwing out crossposting altogether is overkill. -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck