CROSS-POSTING, OR MULTI-POSTING, OR NEITHER?

"Floyd L. Davidson" wrote in message
...
"Battleax" wrote:
"William Graham" wrote:
I have been using my real email address for over 10 years now, and I
have
no problem eliminating the two dozen or so spam messages I get every
day.....It takes me all of 5 minutes or less......I guess everyone

I find the idea that it takes anyone 5 minutes to dump 20-30
emails astounding. If it took me longer than 10-15 seconds...
something would need fixing!

Well, I have an "after market" program called "Qurb" that separates out all
the spam, and sure, I can dump all these in 10 seconds or so....The problem
is, sometimes Qurb screws up, and it separates out something that I need to
read.....Usually a message about something I have ordered on line, that Qurb
can't tell is important to me. So, I peruse all the Qurb messages a bit more
than one normally would......Most are obvious deletes, but a few are worthy
of closer inspection.
The same thing is true of my snail mail. The spammers are very cleaver
at making the envelopes look like government checks, or personal mail, or
something that is, "Important", so I pretty well have to open all the
envelopes, or at least 50% of them. A couple of years ago, I got two checks
from a drug company that totaled about $500. I threw them away, because they
looked just like spam mail.....It was no end of trouble getting the company
to remake those checks.....

Battleax wrote:

Using your valid email address increases the likelihood that some news group
poster will email you personally concerning a newsgroup discussion. This is
especially creepy.

It's kind of creepy that you consider that creepy.

Real name; real address; more than a thousand spam emails per day; still doing
it after all these years.

--
Jeremy |

Jeremy Nixon wrote:
Battleax wrote:


Using your valid email address increases the likelihood that some news group
poster will email you personally concerning a newsgroup discussion. This is
especially creepy.


It's kind of creepy that you consider that creepy.

Real name; real address; more than a thousand spam emails per day; still doing
it after all these years.


Real initials, real email address, been using this email address solely
for Usenet for the last year, get about 10 spams a day and no creeps.

I think it's pretty cheesy when people are afraid to post their real
email addresses.

Greg

--
"All my time I spent in heaven
Revelries of dance and wine
Waking to the sound of laughter
Up I'd rise and kiss the sky" - The Mekons

"Jeremy Nixon" wrote in message
...
Battleax wrote:

Using your valid email address increases the likelihood that some news
group
poster will email you personally concerning a newsgroup discussion. This
is
especially creepy.

It's kind of creepy that you consider that creepy.

Real name; real address; more than a thousand spam emails per day; still
doing
it after all these years.

Yeah....What's "creepy" about people knowing your real email address? I am
70, and have been in the telephone book all of my life, under the name of
William E. Graham. I post under that name, and with the email address
I live in Salem, Oregon, and anyone who wants to talk to
me can telephone me or email me at any time. (I do turn off my telephone
late in the evening, and turn it on again the next morning, so my sleep
won't be interrupted, but a message will be taken in any case.)
All of the above was true long before computers were even invented.

That_Rich wrote:
On Tue, 28 Feb 2006 20:40:18 -0900, (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:

That_Rich wrote:
Well I feel it is rude to x-post.
To each his own, eh.

Yes you are allowed to be irrational if you please.

Cross-posting is *clearly* quite sensible. The mechanism for
cross-posting was intentionally added to Usenet's functionality,
and saying it is rude to use it appropriately is illogical.

I feel it's rude _and_ pure laziness to x-post, that makes me
irrational(?) Perhaps you need some time off the tundra, Floyd.

Yes, that is irrational. You clearly haven't got any idea what
cross-posting is or what it does.

And posting gratuitous personal insults tends to demonstrate it
isn't a one time problem.

You are more than welcome to x-post. Makes no difference to me.

Indeed.

You know what Floyd, I'll bet you'd never talk to a person sitting
next to you in a bar in Nome, Alaska the way you talk to people on
UseNet... that makes you chicken ****.

I live hundreds of miles from Nome, so just why you think bars
there are significant to me is hardly less than another
irrational rant. Besides, you wouldn't have a clue what a bar
in Nome is actually like, what I might or might not do there, or
what makes a "chicken ****" or not.

BTW, bars in Nome *are* chicken ****, almost by definition. Try
tipping one in McGrath, Chicken, or Galena, or for that matter
try joining a party just about *anywhere* on the Yukon River.
You sound like the kinda person with enough "courage" to try it,
and not enough smarts to live to talk about it...

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

Floyd covered it pretty thorougly & accurately here. I'm top-posting to
preserve that & add a few comments.

What I do with cross-posted threads including my own in chose one group
to follow it & mark the other as ignored: this is necessary to preserve
sanity and when folks eliminate the cross posts, they should announce it
and know they may not reach the OP. That might make sense like not
wanting to bore the 35mm gang with digital comments but the caveats
still apply.

I don't mind multiposting actually, that way each group makes their own
unique replies & don't **** each other off but you can end up with
redundant replies and lose the cross-pollinating benefits. But at least
I don't have to read the same messages twice! That's just ridiculous.

If the cross-posted message was done appropriately, leave it intact to
maintain order. Multi-posting only makes sense where there is no
technical answer sought, just opinions. Tell people if you are
cross-posting or eliminating groups.

I'll be marking all this ignored now grin.

Floyd L. Davidson wrote:

Colin D wrote:

As you can see from the header, this post is cross-posted to four
groups, for a reason.


You have just demonstrated that cross-posting is *not*
intrinsically wrong. It can, however, be abused: cross-posting
to newsgroups where the message is inappropriate is an abuse and
is worse than simply posting an off topic message to a single
newsgroup.

Multi-posting is inherently an abuse itself, whether the message
is on topic or not. Multi-posting should be avoided.

(And, note that topicality and netiquette are on topic in any
newsgroup. Cross-posting to a small selection of related
newsgroups is acceptable for such topics. Hence this thread is
quite appropriate.)


I am seeing an increasing number of posts being multi-posted in two or
more of the above groups.


True, and it is an annoying abuse.


Cross-posting is itself annoying enough, but
at least the contributors appear in all groups, whereas multi-posted
messages have different replies according to the particular group, and a
post in one group does not appear in the others.


Broadening the base of discussion is *precisely* the purpose of
cross-posting. It is not annoying *in* *itself*, and is a very
reasonable thing to do _when_ _appropriate_.


If one is
participating in a multi-posted group, it gets tedious as well as
annoying to find the same post in each group just to stay with the
message flow.

I think multi- and cross-posting is a shot-gun approach to posting and
should be banned.


Wrong, and absolutely illogical! Multi-posting *is* banned!
People do it anyway (rarely out of any intent to be annoying,
but instead simply because they don't know the difference).

Cross-posting is beneficial when used appropriately; like
everything else in the world it can be abused, and that abuse
*is* banned... but people do it anyway. Granted that a great
deal of cross-posting abuse is in fact done with the very
purpose of annoying others, but still even with cross-posting
abuse it is mostly done in ignorance.


What's the netiquette or group charter position on this? Should we not
reply to these cross/multi posts? - except this one, of course {:-)


The group charter is irrelevant.

Netiquette is do not ever multi-post and do not ever post (or
worse, cross-post) original articles to newsgroups where the
message (topic) is not appropriate.

Replying to multi-posted articles is hardly a problem, though I
suppose one reasonable response would be to cross-post the
response as appropriate.

Replying to cross-posted articles confuses many people; in
particular there is a problem with setting Followup-To headers.
While it is *clearly* an abuse to start an inappropriately
cross-posted thread, once it has been started if the thread is
actually of any value at all there is no way to narrow the
distribution without potentially cutting off some readers who
are following the thread. In particular it is offensive to
silently add a Followup-To header without announcing it in the
text of the message, but even when announced it is poor form to
assume that others should subscribe to the particular newsgroup
selected by the sender.

Trying to "ban" abuse is a waste of time and effort. The only
recourse is effective use of filters/scoring/killfiles by
individual users. Note that on some newsgroups it *would* make
sense to just filter out everything that is cross-posted, though
it might on occasion delete a useful article. But generally
that is overkill because it will delete some useful articles.

Use of a "score" system, where a number of characteristics are
heuristically evaluated to form a decision that passes or fails
any given message is much preferred, and particularly so when it
is easy to manually manipulate it to add particular authors and
threads. Another nice feature is killing any thread that is
cross-posted to certain specific newsgroups (for example, to any
political discussion newsgroup).

"AustinMN" wrote in message
oups.com...
William Graham wrote:
snip a lot
I have been using my real email address for over 10 years now, and I have
no
problem eliminating the two dozen or so spam messages I get every
day.....It
takes me all of 5 minutes or less......I guess everyone considers such
things to be of different importance, but to me, posting under my real
name
and address is much more important than to let a 5 minute job interfere
with
it.

5 minutes a day comes out to more than 30 hours a year...almost a
week's worth of work. My time is worth a lot more than that.

Austin

No matter how you do it, you are going to have to balance your available
time against messages lost. IOW, there is no way you can get important
messages, and eliminate spam messages without it costing you time. If you
don't post your real email address, then there are people who need to get in
touch with you that won't be able to, and you will suffer from this as well.
(I call this the living in the castle on the hill syndrome) Sure, you will
save your 30 hours a year, but what, exactly will you do with those 30 hours
that is more important than other people being able to get in touch with
you, and send you attachments, and other things that are of interest? What
it comes down to is the choice between interacting freely with the rest of
mankind, or living in a shell of your own making. Have you never wanted to
send someone something of interest, but were unable to, because he/she was
unapproachable for some reason or other? - Well, if you are unapproachable,
then you are putting this same burden on everyone else. You might as well
become a TV commentator, and never read your email or answer your phone.
Then you can talk to the rest of the world 24/7 and never have to hear any
of their responses, so if anyone disagrees with you, you will never know
it........

Battleax wrote:

"William Graham" wrote in message
...

snip


I have been using my real email address for over 10 years now, and I have
no problem eliminating the two dozen or so spam messages I get every
day.....It takes me all of 5 minutes or less......I guess everyone
considers such things to be of different importance, but to me, posting
under my real name and address is much more important than to let a 5
minute job interfere with it.

snip


Using your valid email address increases the likelihood that some news group
poster will email you personally concerning a newsgroup discussion. This is
especially creepy.



It also increases the likelihood that a SPAMbot will harvest your email
so you get a never ending stream of offers to find your match on the
internet, Viagra at a discount, hot stock tips & opportunities to share
in a Nigerian fortune for the asking.

That_Rich wrote:
On Wed, 01 Mar 2006 03:06:57 -0900, (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:

I live hundreds of miles from Nome, so just why you think bars
there are significant to me is hardly less than another
irrational rant. Besides, you wouldn't have a clue what a bar
in Nome is actually like, what I might or might not do there, or
what makes a "chicken ****" or not.

Actually it is all quite obvious.

BTW, bars in Nome *are* chicken ****, almost by definition. Try
tipping one in McGrath, Chicken, or Galena, or for that matter
try joining a party just about *anywhere* on the Yukon River.
You sound like the kinda person with enough "courage" to try it,
and not enough smarts to live to talk about it...

I need *courage* to sit in a bar and sip a drink?? And you call me
irrational(?)
Ah.... nothing like a few pops at the Malamute saloon )

Never been there, but you know all about it, eh?

Didn't you notice that I put quote marks around the word up
there? Another way to spell that is "stupidity".

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

That_Rich wrote:
On Wed, 01 Mar 2006 16:22:58 -0900, (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:

Didn't you notice that I put quote marks around the word up
there? Another way to spell that is "stupidity".

Nah Floyd, considering what an insignificant voice you are I don't
notice much of anything you write.

You sure have put a *lot* of effort into something you now claim isn't
significant. :-)

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)