🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BB6CDA09.17275%bellajonez@yahoo.co.uk>,
Bella Jones <bellajonez@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

><thinking aloud> Why do people cross post in the first place? Surely it
>takes only a few seconds more to post to each group separately, and you're
>going to have to read the groups separately anyway. (unless there's some
>magic newsreader thing I don't know about). Not having a go, just curious.

Because it reduces the amount that's sent and downloaded. This cross-posted
article will only be sent to the server once, covering both groups, and at
the receiving end if somebody is receiving both groups (not unimaginable)
and their newsreader uses NEWNEWS, it will download both the headers but
only fetch the body once, distributing it internally to the two groups [1].
For articles posted separately, the body is sent and received separately
each time. Not a huge difference in this case but when considered Net wide,
especially with large articles or binaries, quite a reduction in traffic.
In the days when a 28800 modem was *fast*, it also made life much better
for the user.

[1] This doesn't apply to newsreaders like NewsHopper and MacSOUP which
fetch articles by number, group by group. They download individually every
article you read. The problem is that article numbers aren't consistent
from server to server so if you change news source, for instance, or if the
news server crashes badly, you have to reset the numbers and start again.
With NEWNEWS, any news server on the planet will work for you without
changing anything in your newsbase. Having used a newsreader with NEWNEWS
for quite some time in my early days on Demon, with a PeeCee and then using
MacSlurp and ToadNews/TheNews on a Mac, I can say that although using
NewsHopper and article numbers is an abortion, at the time I found it
worked so much better for me, as a program, than the pukka NEWNEWS
alternative, that I've stayed with it ever since.

-- 
Peter