gam@amdahl.amdahl.com (Gordon A. Moffett) (11/20/87)
In article <398@cerebus.UUCP> ronc@cerebus.UUCP (Ron Christian) writes: >I'm not very good at checking the Newsgroups line, but when I happen to >notice that I'm following up to a cross-posted article, I confine my posting >to the newsgroup I happen to be reading. If we all did that, perhaps the >problem would go away. For other reasons, I agree with narrowing your follow-up articles to one newsgroup, if possible. But read on! >(When are the net.gods going to produce a version of news that uses symbolic >links for cross-posted articles?) They already have! I just looked in /usr/spool/news/soc/men, did an ls -lis there, and got this: 2722 1 -rw-rw-r-- 2 netnews news 3886 Nov 5 14:55 3690 3444 1 -rw-rw-r-- 7 netnews news 2063 Nov 5 21:54 3691 18709 1 -rw-rw-r-- 1 netnews news 1863 Nov 6 13:05 3692 22107 1 -rw-rw-r-- 2 netnews news 1013 Nov 6 13:51 3693 23675 1 -rw-rw-r-- 3 netnews news 2886 Nov 6 15:27 3694 (and so on ...) The fourth column is number of links to that file. Now look at the newsgroups of these files: 3690:Newsgroups: soc.motss,soc.men 3691:Newsgroups: talk.abortion,soc.men,soc.singles,soc.women,soc.misc,soc.motss,rec.nude 3692:Newsgroups: soc.men 3693:Newsgroups: soc.women,soc.men 3694:Newsgroups: soc.singles,soc.women,soc.men Sure enough, the number of newsgroups correspond to the number of links to the file. We're running 2.11.12 here, but I think 2.10.3 does this, too. So I've always ignored the hoopla about "too much cross-posting", because if you are running the latest software, a cross-posted article costs you 16 bytes for each additional newsgroup, the size of an entry in the corresponding directory. Cross-posting soc.men and soc.women is fine, as sometime the topic spans both sexes. And if you want to discuss men's or women's matters exclusively, choose the appropriate newsgroup. But don't worry about cross-posting. I think it is a good use of the network to cross-post to several newsgroups when an article spans several topics, but as I said above, I encourage *follow-ups* to be one or two newgroups, if possible. Unfortunately cross-posted articles inherit the newsgroup list from the parent, unless you say differently in the "Followup-To:" line in the header So remember to edit your "Followup-To:" line! If cross-posting is causing duplicate articles on your system, upgrade your software! (From glancing at the code for 2.11, there appears to be a simulated "link" for VMS systems.) Oh, I am directing followups to news.software.b, tho I leave that to the persons who'll follow up. -- Gordon A. Moffett gam@amdahl.amdahl.com +1 408 746-8287 {ames,sun,uunet,ihnp4}!amdahl!gam