🚀 go-pugleaf

Mike Holloway <holloway@cris.com> wrote:

>I've seen posts to lstown-l from people with legitamate reasons for wanting to 
>cross-post to several lists, but more than 6 should certainly be labeled as 
>excessive.

There are two common categories of articles cross-posted to many groups.
These are (a) spams and (b) FAQs and formal newsgroup proposals.  Cutting
articles out on the basis of number of groups on the Newsgroups line only
encourages spammers to post separately to each group, which is even worse
than batching spam to multiple groups.  We want to discourage spam.  Spam
is not the same as cross-posting to a lot of groups.  Inappropriate cross-
posting is also a bad thing, but it is not nearly as bad as spam, and I
know of no algorithm that can decide whether cross-posting is appropriate.

Speaking as creator of the majority of sci.bio.* newsgroups (most of which
have gated mailing lists) and as a member of group-advice, which helps to
administer the "big 8" Usenet newsgroups, I am

	Una Smith, una.smith@yale.edu