Has anyone else noticed a large number of msgs cross-posted here and
to rec.gardens.edible and to rec.food.cooking and heaven knows where
else recently? I looked up some references and found this:

"...remember that excessive cross-posting is considered bad form
without a good reason, because it multiplies the traffic on the
Internet several times without adding any new content. In the extreme
case, if everybody cross-posted every message to every group, then
every group would look exactly the same!"

While 'gardening' is a pretty general category, there *are*
rec.gardens.edible for food crops -- veg, fruit, herbs, etc.-- and
rec.food.cooking for the *use* (not growing) of herbs and veg. I use
(Free) Agent as a newsreader, and it's too easy to post one reply to
multiple groups, which does exactly what the above paragraph
describes. I'm getting tired of reading several of the groups I
subscribe to and finding whole sets of duplicate posts.

Is there some way to gently steer cross-posters to relevent
newsgroups? Like many here, I am interested in and read and post in
..edibles and .food.cooking, but when I try to construct a follow-up
post and see it's cross-posted in 5 groups, I keep quiet (and don't
tell me that's a blessing!)