billp@bronze.UUCP (Bill Pfeifer) (10/04/83)
>>> But why (too often?) do I see an article with the following heading: >>> >>> Newsgroups: net.general,net.a,net.b,net.c,net.d,net.e,net.f,net.g,net.etc >>> >>> Is it ever necessary to post the same article to three, four, or five >>> newsgroups? Most of us read more than one newsgroup, and for many, >>> there is often an intersection of these posted newsgroups. >>> >>> Such multiple postings increase the number of articles transmitted >>> around the net, using up modem time, port time, and disk space. That's a very common misconception. If the article was posted once to multiple groups, it is only transmitted once, and stored on disk only once. There is a link to that file in each news directory corresponding to each group. If you read the news all in one session, you will see that article only once, no matter how many groups it was posted to. If you see it more than once, you either got out of news by typing "q" and resumed later, or the author repeatedly submitted the article, one group at a time. My pet peeve is seeing the same article submitted to the same group twice or thrice. What usually happened is that the author posted the article and immediately typed "news". When the just posted article did not appear, s/he assumed that it didn't make it and posted it again. Just give the system a little (or sometimes a lot of) time to enter the article into its files before trying again! Bill Pfeifer {decvax,ucbvax,zehntel,uw-beaver} !tektronix!tekmdp!billp
tjt@kobold.UUCP (T.J.Teixeira) (10/08/83)
I think one source of the same article appearing on multiple newsgroups as different articles is articles forwarded from the Arpanet mailing lists, particularly those forwarded to net.micro (INFO-MICRO@MIT-MC) and net.micro.cpm (INFO-CPM@MIT-MC). I'm not sure if it is possible to weed these out since by the time they show up on Usenet, the original recipient has disappeared. If the information is still available at the Arpanet-Usenet gateway, perhaps the forwarders of these messages could reach some agreement about messages sent to multiple newsgroups. i.e. choose one forwarder to send the message to both newgroups, and have the other ignore the message if both mailing lists are included in the To: list.