woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (11/17/89)
There has recently been a rash of cross-posting in articles submitted to this group. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but a couple of problems have come up. The first one is, several people have sent in articles cross-posted to so many groups that the newsgroups header becomes corrupted, and occasionally the corruption spreads to other headers. This makes it impossible for me to post the article at all unless I make decisions which are really the author's and not mine to make. (I could send such submissions back to the author for correction, but people already complain about the hassle of posting to a moderated group, and I do not wish to aggravate that situation). So, I want to set a policy that I can uniformly apply. It will be this: any article cross-posted to too many groups (meaning: the newsgroups header is either corrupted or too long for my B 2.11.14 news software to handle) will be posted only to news.announce.newgroups. So please limit your cross-posting. I really think that about 10 groups ought to be sufficient as a maximum, but I won't enforce anything like that except as noted above. Secondly, there is a good deal of misunderstanding about how cross-posting to moderated groups works. If you cross-post to this group (which is moderated) and also to other unmoderated groups, the posting will NOT show up in ANY groups until it reaches me and I post it. Then it will show up in all the groups it was cross-posted to (unless the newsgroups header is corrupted, as above). Lastly, there are many times when I do not log into the computer over the weekend (that means I had a good weekend :-) So, if you post something on Friday, don't expect to see it before Monday. Also, even on weekdays I typically only go through the postings once a day, so it may be as long as a day before the article gets posted (plus propogation delays, which these days are nearly zero if you are on the Internet). Thanks for putting up with this article. I shall try to keep administrativia articles to a minimum, but there was obviously a lot of confusion surrounding the cross-posting issue and I wanted to clear that up. --Greg (moderator)