alb@alice.UUCP (06/29/83)
2.10 news understands the Followup-to header, which you can put in when you submit your news. Given the header, readnews will followup to whichever group it is told.
smb@mhb5b.UUCP (06/29/83)
The problem isn't articles posted to multiple groups, but articles posted several times, once to each group. Most extant copies of B netnews, and all copies of A, will only show you an article once, no matter how many groups it's posted to. (There is a weakness in the B implementation, in that you must read all of the groups used in one readnews session, or you will indeed see the article more than once.)
ellis@flairvax.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (07/01/83)
Some articles, like this one, get posted unnecessarily to several newsgroups. If I had any choice in the matter, it'd have only gone to net.news, but being a followup to an article in multiple groups, I am unable to edit out the second one. Forgive my ignorance, but after rereading readnews 2.9 documentation MANY times, I still can't figure out how to control where my articles go in any way other than typing "f" (or "f <new title>") to another article in the desired newsgroup. This means I cannot start up a new discussion in a newsgroup that has been dead for a while. Or add or remove a newsgroup to the one(s) in which I am responding. Logic tells me that there is surely some way to submit an article to a newsgroup without using "f" -- unless first articles to groups are created by superusers forging fake submissions in appropriate spool directories to respond to. The only command that I never use is "X <system>" because no matter what I type for <system>, it refuses to do anything but glorb out an error message. Exactly what is this undocumented thing called <system> ? Is my readnews broken ? It would also be nice to have 2.10 (I've got plenty of blank tape). Even with its colons. Michael
silver@csu-cs.UUCP (07/03/83)
Everybody keeps saying, "it doesn't matter if you multiple post, let the software take care of it." What about the multiplication of resource usage to store and transmit the duplicates? Surely that is of concern! (I'm told that the USENET software does maintain duplicate copies, not just one; if I'm wrong, forgive me -- and correct me!).
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (07/06/83)
If the user posts the article properly (by posting it ONCE and mentioning all newsgroups at once), only one copy is transmitted and only one copy is stored. If they post it separately to each newsgroup (a practice punishable by boiling in oil), there is no reasonable way to detect the duplication, so multiple resources are consumed.
furuta@uw-beaver.UUCP (07/06/83)
In my opinion posting to multiple newsgroups is not so much of a problem if the person doing the posting posts to all groups at the same time. The news interface I use only presents the article in one of the groups, not in all of them. Contrast this to what happens when people post messages separately to multiple groups and I have to look at multiple copies.