Re: Retro Guy on Multiposting

On Sun, 2 Feb 2025 13:37:58 +0000, Retro Guy wrote:

On Sat, 1 Feb 2025 17:49:33 +0000, Will Dockery wrote:

On Sat, 1 Feb 2025 13:41:18 +0000, George J. Dance wrote:

(Edited for focus):

I don't think that NG ever understood the point of crossposting, as they
(their preferred pronoun) posted on usenet only through Google groups
(which stopped allowing it before NG ever showed up). I don't think they
ever realized that posting to usenet was any different from posting on a
web forum; they did not understand that each posted message was
bandwidth travelling all over the country to multiple servers, and that
the point of crossposting was to keep it down, because they had no
conception of that ecwn happening.
>
To avoid trolls, I used to post individual copies of the same message to
different groups; but not only was that more work for me, but it was
also putting more strain on usenet itself. So I've ended up going back
to crossposting myself, at the explicit request of the NovaBBS head
honcho, RetroGuy, himself.
>
In short: there is no reason to think you have to defend, justify, or
excuse crossposting here. On the contrary, crossposting is the
reasonable default.

>
A quick note about posting the same message individually, George.
>
A while back Retro Guy wrote that this method doesn't work on Nova BBS,
repeats like that for whatever reason don't go to Usenet as a whole, but
traditional crossposts do.
>
I don't know all the technical details so hopefully Retro Guy will see
this and explain it again.

>
It's meant to be an anti-spam measure, and seems to work well at that.
Many times, spammers just paste the same message to one group after
another. This blocking helps reduce that issue. Then, by limiting the
number of groups when crossposting, you reduce the effect of a spam
flood.
>
Multiposting is also irritiating for users reading using newsreader
software. If an article is a crosspost, most newsreaders mark it as
"READ" in all the groups it is crossposted to once you read it. But
multiposted articles show up as "NEW' in each and every group they are
sent to, whether you read them in one or not.
>
Also, consider that the most popular software for Usenet distribution
(inn), keeps only one copy of an article in it's database for
crossposted articles, but must keep individiual copies for multiposted
articles. Multiposting can be a waste of disk space.

Thanks again, Retro Guy and George Dance.