🚀 go-pugleaf

in article BB6CED529668E13D30@192.168.0.2, Peter Ceresole at
peter@cara.demon.co.uk wrote on 23/8/03 10:07 am:

> 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.

Thanks for the info. All this seems to suggest a slight conflict of interest
between the needs of the server and the needs of an individual ng...