Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

mariaconlon001@hotmail.com spake thus:

There are several reasons for preferring cross posting in a case like
this.  News readers recognise cross-posted articles and mark them as
read in all newsgroups after you have viewed one of them.  So those
of us who read both AUE and AEU don't have to wade through two sets
of correspondence.  Replies get posted to all groups by default (even
if you are not subscribed to the other groups), which means that
everybody can see replies posted via both groups, so we don't get
duplicated responses in different groups.

I used the plural because I assumed that more than one person would read
the post(s).

If you have a cross-post manager in your newsgroup client software, then a
cross-posted post will only be visible in the first group of the set of
groups, while the same post posted separately will usually be treated as
two separate posts and show up twice. Many of us follow AEU and AUE (and
some UCLE as well), my newsgroup client presents the groups in alphabetical
order unless told otherwise, so I only see one copy of a post that has been
cross-posted to the two groups, in AEU. The one in AUE is ignored.

If you have a question/comment that could be addressed in several very
disparate groups, it may be wise to post separately to each group,
otherwise threads crossposted to all of the groups can get wildly out of
hand in any one group because of thread drift. But with what I call "the
English community" of AEU, AUE and UCLE, cross-posting simply prevents
copies being seen in each group.

I, personally, am not in favour of setting one group for follow-ups,
because I've seen on occasions a group chosen which, after all of the
responses are in, is not the one that most of the responders were actually
subscribed to.

Is he the dyslexic brother of J. Arthur Rank?