Frogleg wrote in
:

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!"

My understanding is when a message is crossposted, it's only sent once
and only stored once, althougth that might be implementation dependent.
Where did you find the above quote?

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!)

hehe, I hit one today that was crossposted to five (snails). Yeah it's
annoying ... back when I used 'trn' as a newsreader, I seem to remember
it not being a problems (properly crossposted and read articles in one
group would show up as read in the crossposted groups). I doesn't seem
to be the case with Xnews (that I'm using now), I don't know about Forte
Free Agent.

-- Salty