Too much cross-posting?

[Gary S. Trujillo]

In article <674 at whizz.uucp> bbh at whizz.UUCP (Bud Hovell) writes
	(not necessarily in the following order):

> ...why has it been decided to leave the unix-pc group a non-standard group
> not to be carried routinely in the standard feed? Who benefits - and how?

Well, I won't offer any justification for the two groups, except to offer
the explanation that comp.sys.att is intended for *all* varieties of machines
manufactured and sold by AT&T (including 3Bx, 6836, etc.), whereas the unix-pc
newsgroup is solely for the UNIXpc (7300 / 3B1).  I suspect that, due to the
limited number of folks out there who have the UNIXpc relative to other types
of computers, many, if not most, backbone sites don't consider it worth their
while (read phone costs and disk space) to carry unix-pc.* newsgroups.

> Over the past several months, I've become increasingly aware of the huge
> percentage of articles which cross-post between comp.sys.att and unix-pc.*.
> When I get into comp.sys.att (second in order in my .newsrc), I find
> myself virtually wearing out the 'n' key...

Well, I don't think cross-posting is inherently a bad thing, since (at least
under UNIX implementations of the network news software) cross-postings are
implemented by means of links, so no extra disk space is utilized.  The
benefits of cross-postings include the fact that they can achieve a wider
distribution for certain articles whose subject matter straddle the categ-
ories defined by existing newsgroups.

I'd say that, if you're having to use the 'n' key to avoid re-reading articles,
your news-reading software needs to be tweaked to recognize the fact that a
given article has already been read.  I recall that when I first installed rn
on my machine (10/87), I had to make some slight modifications to the code to
get cross-postings to be dealt with correctly.  Now that I look at the code
again, it seems my problem had to do with the processing of the "Xref" line
in message headers.  For some reason, my site name was, at that time - at
least, not being placed on Xref lines, so I ifdef'd out the code starting
at line 402 in bits.c:

    #if 0
            if (strNE(tmpbuf,inews_site)) {
    #ifdef DEBUGGING
            if (debug)
                printf("Xref not from %s--ignoring\n",inews_site) FLUSH;
    #endif

I dunno if that's your problem, but the point is that the news reader should
mark messages as read the first time they're encountered in any newsgroup,
so that you'll not be bothered with them a second time when you're reading
other newsgroups to which such articles have been cross-posted.

Good luck!
-- 
Gary S. Trujillo			      {linus,bbn,m2c}!spdcc!gnosys!gst
Somerville, Massachusetts		     {icus,ima,stech,wjh12}!gnosys!gst