Why and how to crosspost
When you post a question or article to
Usenet,
you should normally post to it one newsgroup only.
If you post it to several groups,
always use crossposting.
This document explains in some detail
why
and
how
to do that.
For a shorter explanation, see
How can I post a message to more than one Usenet newsgroup?
in the
Indiana
University Knowledge Base.
Content
Generally, post your question or article to the group that is most
suitable for the topic.
See How to find the right place to post (FAQ).
Specifically select a group which is as specific as possible.
For example, if your question deals with engineering, don't post it to
sci.engr before checking whether your topic actually
belongs to one of the more specialized
sci.engr.* groups.
If you can't find a suitable group, don't
post to an arbitrary sample of groups; that would be very unproductive,
and your message might even be considered as
spam, against which serious measures can be taken.
Instead, spend some time in studying the
descriptions of newsgroups
(see e.g. the helpful
Tile.Net/news
resources) and checking, perhaps using
Google Groups, what people actually
discuss about in the groups.
It is always a very good idea to check the FAQs first,
i.e. the lists of answers to frequently asked questions.
See the Usenet FAQ archive
(or
FAQs by Newsgroup
at the
University of Oxford
or
List of Usenet FAQ's at
OSU).
You might not find your question answered there (after all, there's only
about 95% probability for that) but the FAQ for a group gives a very
good picture of what's commonly discussed in a group.
Note: These considerations apply to posting a message to
several groups in general, whether you use crossposting or not.
You can probably find dozens of Usenet
groups for which your message would be on-topic, especially if
you count national and local groups too. Why not post to all of them,
to get a wider audience? Wouldn't that increase the odds of finding someone
who can answer your question, or buy your used car, or
join your club, or share your beliefs, or whatever is your intent
of posting this time?
The document How to find the right place to post (FAQ) duly warns:
It is considered highly inappropriate to broadcast
your message to a wide selection of newsgroups merely to have more people
read it. Note also that many people automatically ignore articles posted
to more than two or three groups.
In practical terms, there would be a high risk of getting
classified as a spammer and boycotted for that very reason.
Even if your message won't be cancelled ("unspammed"), the odds are
that the more knowledgeable the reader, the more he regards
sending a message to many groups as an indication of cluelesnsess.
This means that you would get responses mostly from less
knowledgeable readers such as
- "try this" people
- whose eagerness
to help greatly exceeds their capability of helping you
(and who didn't bother trying it themselves)
- "me too" people
- who post (or mail)
a response which quotes
your article in its entirety
(always a warning signal on Usenet!),
with just a content-free
one-liner appended to it.
Quite often people repeat their question simply by sending an article
another time, to the same group or to another group, if they haven't got
any answers (or any answers they like).
That's very unproductive.
If you have got unsatisfactory answers, read them again.
It is quite possible that you have got the right answer but
refuse to accept it (e.g. you asked how to do something and got the
answer that it cannot be done) or fail to understand it.
If rereading (and consulting any references cited) does not help,
consider sending a followup article, asking for clarification.
This lets people discuss the topic in the same thread.
If you got no answers, there are several possibilities:
- Your question was too vague; for example, when asking for
help in a problem, you did not explain the problem and related issues.
How could anyone answer meaningfully when someone writes "help, my
computer does not work"?
- Nobody was motivated enough to consider answering. Perhaps
you did not explain the context of the question so that people
could see why it is important to anyone.
(Explaining the
context can also be important for the problem description,
of course.)
Perhaps you asked a question which you could easily answer yourself by
doing a simple Web search, reading an elementary textbook,
making a phone call, or consulting an encyclopedia in a public
library. Why would others do that for you?
- You asked so impolitely that nobody cared to answer.
Perhaps you did not mean to be impolite. There
are cultural differences; for example, plain imperatives
("Send me information - -") might be regarded as rude,
and
asking for replies by E-mail is
generally rude.
- Nobody knows a useful answer. Naturally, on Usenet, that seldom
prevents people from sending followups. ☺
So you should do some study. When trying to solve the problem yourself
you might find something useful, e.g. in the sense that you can formulate
the question better. Especially in technical matters, it is important
to use correct terms.
If you end up with sending your question anew,
- post it to the same group as the original question, referring
to it, and as a followup to it (unless you had originally made
the cardinal
error of writing a bad
Subject header)
- however, if you realize that the group was all wrong, repent,
and sin no more; this time,
select a group carefully
(and remember to refer to your first attempt if there were some answers;
people who consider answering your problem may understand those
answers better than you did; usually mentioning the group and
Subject and date are enough, but for the comfort of busy
specialists, you should try to find the Message-ID too and tell it)
- take some time to formulate it well; give details.
OK, let's assume that you still want to send your message to
several groups. (Sometimes there could be a reason.)
You might compose a message, using your favorite program,
and post it to one group. Then you could, depending on the program you
use, just edit the line that contains the group name and repost,
or use some other method of sending messages with identical content
as separate postings.
This means
multiposting:
several copies of the
text are sent, as separate messages, within different
message identifiers and with no connection to each other
as far as the Usenet techniques and protocols are considered.
This is the completely wrong way.
(Well, perhaps there is no perfection in madness. You could also
se different headings to confuse things more, or you could type
the message copies by hand so that they use different formulations.)
To begin with, it's more awkward to you than crossposting.
More seriously, it will disrupt the discussion on Usenet,
such as answers to your questions and comments on those answers.
Let's assume that you post a question to two groups, say
alt.html and
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
(c.i.w.a.h.),
as separate postings.
Let's optimistically assume that the
question is really on-topic for both groups (in our example,
that the question is about HTML authoring for the WWW).
First, to see all answers, you need to check what will
be posted to both groups. More work for you.
Crossposting is easier
than sending separate postings.
You don't really need
any other reason. The following discusssion is here to tell you
why failure to crosspost really disturbs people.
Most readers of the two groups probably read only one of them.
(This is particularly true for very active groups like those I have
chosen as examples.) If I read c.i.w.a.h. only, I will
see your question but not those answers that have been sent
to your identical message in alt.html.
This is especially harmful if the answers sent to the group I read are
all wrong but some answers in the other group aren't.
And people will spend their time in trying to find answers to your
question, after seeing that it still remains unanswered, without
knowing that someone took great effort and solved your problem -
in another group.
Everyone who reads both groups will see your article twice,
with no obvious indication of seeing something they had already
seen. If you used crossposting, most newsreaders would show the
article once only to each reader (and even people using other
newsreaders would be able to easily see that it's a crossposted article).
Don't you think such
repetition will make communication more effective!
And people who read both groups will get pissed off when they
see, after taking the trouble of answering your question in one group,
that an identical question had been sent to another group.
There's little one can do then. One could post a followup message to the other
group, including a copy of the answer or a reference to it,
but in addition to being extra traffic that could have been avoided,
it really does not solve the problem. The two replies are distinct articles,
and any comments to them will go to the respective groups. Using
Followup-To fields referring to both groups could cause
more harm than do any good. In any case, there is no way to
bring two
threads together
once the mistake has been made by sending a message to several
groups without crossposting.
Crossposting simply means that a single posting
(article) is sent to Usenet so that it is destined to two or more
newsgroups. This means that all replies (followups) to it,
and replies to it, etc., belong to the same
thread. This lets
people read them conveniently, seeing how they belong together.
Warning: The rules of a group may forbid crossposting.
In such cases, the best action is to decide between sending to
that group only and sending to some other group(s) only.
Generally, you should not post to a group before reading its rules,
which might be found in its
FAQ.
The way to crosspost is simply to compose and send one message
once, just writing
two or more newsgroups names, separated with commas,
into the Newsgroups: header.
(Use commas only as separators, with no spaces.)
How you do that depends on the program you use.
Typically, there's a line visible on the screen above the
area where to type your message, with
Newsgroups: or something similar on it.
Just write the names there.
Sometimes you might have problems with this - there are so
many programs people use for posting to Usenet - but you need
to solve them. Inability to find help for problems in
the elementary use of
one's newsreader is no excuse for causing problems
to a very large number of people.
Example. Let's assume you are using
Outlook Express for posting to Usenet. In that case,
you should before your first posting check the settings: make sure
(via the Tools menu and Options submenu) that
the news sending format is Plain Text). Assume you have been
reading alt.html and wish to post a question to it so
that it will go to
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html too, with
crossposting.
If you click on the "Compose Message" icon when
visiting alt.html, the following appears
(with some variation between different installations of Outlook Express):
Now you could just click on the position after the prefilled text
"alt.html", to make the cursor appear there, and type
,comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html.
Such a simple approach works on most newsreaders.
Using Outlook Express, there is a
more convenient way too, which
helps in avoiding typing errors you might make:
- Click on the small icon before "alt.html" (or whatever appears in
its place).
- A "newsgroups picker" will appear. It's a separate small window
for adding (or removing) newsgroups. It's easy and intuitive to
use. Click on "OK" when done.
- Now you will see the message composition window, with the Newsgroups:
line filled with a list of groups. Just write your message subject
and content normally and send it.
Using the more convenient way, OE displays
a space after each comma at the
"Newsgroup" like. This deviates from recommendable
Usenet practice. However, luckily OE sends the
message without those spaces.
Generally, when intending to send a comment (reply, followup)
to an article, check the list of groups that the article
has been sent to. If there's more than one group there,
the odds are that the article deserves no answer, and the
probability increases as the number of groups increases.
If you send a comment to a crossposted article,
your comment will by default get crossposted too, unless the
original sended included a
Followup-To header. Consider the
risks of sending to several groups before acting.
If it's a
"spam"
article, which contains off-topic material,
you wouldn't make things any better by sending a comment article.
On the contrary, you would then
look rather foolish too.
(By the way, "spammers" don't read Usenet articles. They just
send data to Usenet.)
If the article has been crossposted to a few groups for a good
reason, consider directing followups to your comment to just one
of the groups, namely the one for which the issue is most on-topic.
You would do this by including a
Followup-To header
(among the other headers)
containing the name of
that group.
You may need to use a program-specific method for
including such a header. Just as an example, on Outlook Express,
when composing your reply, use the View menu, where selecting
"Full Headers" will turn on the display of additional headers.
You can later turn it off the same way when you don't need them any more.
Your article would then be sent (with crossposting) to all of the groups
but replies to it would go to one group only (if the sender does not take
a special action to override your
Followup-To header).
The point is that people who read, say, just one of the groups will
see that (part of) the discussion is moved to another group; they can then
decide whether to visit that group to see just that discussion.