I assume here that the reader is probably someone who has received mail from a talk.bizarre FAQ automailer, and is surprised that they are being accused of posting to talk.bizarre, much like this sad individual:
| I have not posted to talk.bizarre ever. I have recently posted to | alt.music.christian and alt.music.percussion, but that's it. What gives?
What gave, of course, is that he had been reading one of those two groups, and blindly followed up to a crossposted "troll".
In this discourse, I attempt to give advice to the reader on how to detect inappropriate, and especially inadvertant, crossposted followups, and how to avoid them. Ensuring that your articles to not go to groups you do not intend, especially to groups which are not interested in the material, will markedly improve the quality of your enjoyment of all newsgroups, not just talk.bizarre.
A "crosspost" is a single article which is posted with multiple newsgroups
on the Newsgroups: line; this enables multiple newsgroups to see
a single article without requiring multiple copies of the article, and also
enables a discussion thread to continue simultaneously in several related
newsgroups. Unfortunately, it also
enables a discussion thread to continue simultaneously in several unrelated
newsgroups.
Not all crossposts are bad. An article crossposted between, say, sci.electronics and rec.radio.amateur.homebrew telling people where they can buy electronic components for radio experimentation is an excellent way to reach two audiences who don't necessarily overlap yet who share a common interest. But what would be the common interest found in the following list of newsgroups?
Newsgroups: alt.christnet, talk.rumors, rec.humor, alt.conspiracy, alt.alien.visitors, talk.bizarre, alt.atheism.satire, talk.religion.misc, alt.fan.bill-gates, alt.cyberpunk, alt.stupidity, alt.imploding.kibo, alt.society.generation-x, alt.thrash
Answer: none. But a lot of those groups contain rather excitable people who are quite happy to post long, detailed corrections of articles which are so patently absurd that any reasonable person would conclude that the article was a deliberate attempt to get people's goats. (This is an example of a "troll", in fact.)
Other times, you find people posting to multiple newsgroups because they fancy
an interest on the part of those newsgroups in whatever their topic is, despite
a complete lack of evidence for said interest. Sometimes this comes about
from a failure to consider what other people might be interested in, sometimes
it comes from the poster simply being stark staring mad (you'd think the
inclusion of "alt.conspiracy" in the Newsgroups: line would be
a good clue to that; no such luck).
My own favorite newsgroup gets its own special variant of this problem (the "failure to consider" problem, not the "stark staring mad" problem; the latter is not, in and of itself, a disqualification for posting to talk.bizarre): some experience-challenged individual sees an old rerun of a Comedy Club show on cable TV and really likes one of the jokes about cats. They think this retread is so unusual (because they've never heard it before in all their months of TV watching) that they think "a bizarre joke about cats! Aha! I'll post it to rec.humor, talk.bizarre, and rec.pets.cats!" Whether the broken, twisted and bloody corpse is covered with anvil prints or claw marks depends pretty much on which news hierarchy gets better propagation speed that day, talk.bizarre or rec.pets.cats; at any rate, the outcome is never pretty. (If you have a Macintosh, this sound file will document the sad case of someone who failed to distinguish "bizarre" from "stale joke that we all heard years ago".)
And if you remain unconvinced by the above, always keep in mind that there is
a crossposting trap ready to be sprung on the unsuspecting and the
willfully inattentive: the newsgroup misc.test. The newsgroup
misc.test is intended to generate automatic replies from a
wide variety of systems all over the world which are running automatic reply
programs; it is intended to be used by people with news propagation problems
who want some kind of visible proof that their articles are, indeed, getting
out. It has also routinely been used by people who post "trolls" as a way
of further embarrassing people who fall for the trap by following up without
thought. The mail load you save could be your own.
When you follow up to a netnews article, your news reading program will
generally start out with a Newsgroups: line reflecting either
the Newsgroups: line of the original article, or the
Followup-To: line of the original article (if it had one).
(Some newsreaders are designed to pick only the first newsgroup of the
line, or only the currently-read newsgroup; this is rare, however, and if
you got to this page because of a claim that you crossposted, you don't
have one of those newsreaders.) Always check the
Newsgroups: line, if your newsreader shows it to you, and
always be ready to alter it to properly target your intended audience,
if your newsreader allows you to. If you do so, and if you
encourage others to do so, the amount of irrelevant noise you have to wade
through to find articled in which you are interested will diminish. Only
you can prevent crosspost fires.
If your newsreader does not show you the newsgroups to which you are following up, or if it does not allow you to alter the selection, you should strongly consider discarding that Close-and-Play newsreading program and get one which allows to you actually target your intended audience. I am told that newsreaders on toy BBS systems and the big commercial services (there's a difference?) are especially prone to this failing. If you are using one of these services and do not know if you can tailor the Newsgroups line when you respond to a public netnews post, ask the friendly customer service representatives whose bloated salaries you are paying how to do this and why the newsreader does not make it obvious; if the answer is that you simply cannot, demand to know why they insist that you ride a tricycle on the Information Superhighway, and find a service that provides useful tools.
As I gather more information, I plan to list newsreaders that are known to be unable to allow respondants to decide where to (and where not to) send their messages. Please email me information about such deficient newsreaders.
So far, I have been informed of AOL's newsreader's crippling limitations, which include: