"Jose" wrote in message
.. .
It seems to me you may not understand how cross-posting works.

I believe I do. However, newsreaders often don't.

Often? I can safely state that is categorically false. Often would imply
that some significant number of newsreaders don't do cross-posting
correctly, and/or that a significant number people are using such
newsreaders. Name two such commonly used newsreaders, please.

Some newsreaders (I've been stuck with them sometimes) will only post to
the newsgroup from which the reply was made, and ignore the rest of the
crossposting.

I have never heard of such a thing. Please name a couple of newsreaders
that, by default, reply only to the newsgroup that the user of that
newsreader is currently viewing, rather than respecting the entire
Newsgroups: field.

Not that it would be relevant to your point, but I have still never heard of
such a thing. You claim to have been "stuck with them", so not only do you
believe one such newsreader exists, you apparently believe there is more
than one and that you have even used more than one.

In any case, again: this particular assertion of yours simply claims that
some newsreaders are out there doing the same bad thing that you do
manually. I fail to see how you emulating a bad newsreader is supposed to
be a good thing.

Some newsreaders will present crossposted messages as new, even if they
have been read in a different thread.

This would be irrelevant to your behavior. Just because someone else's
newsreader isn't respecting the message ID (assuming there is such a
newsreader in common use), that's no reason for you to change the
Newsgroups: field.

But even so, please name two such newsreaders. The whole point of
cross-posting is to avoid this problem, and I have never heard of a
newsreader that exhibits that problem. You claim "some" exist...please let
us know which ones.

Some newsreaders can be set to send replies to places other than the
originating newsgroup, and other newsreaders are unable to detect this and
defend against it.

"Defend against it"? You say that like it's some sort of attack or
something. Any user can of course edit the message headers prior to
posting, to change where the post goes. And of course, using the
"Followup-To:" field a person can change the default for where a post goes.
But this isn't default behavior, and in any case has nothing to do with
whether you leave the cross-posting fields intact or not.

I don't know what newsreader any individual will be using.

So what? The point isn't what other people's newsreaders do, it's whether
it makes any sense whatsoever for you to prune the Newsgroups: field. The
only valid reason to do so is when one or more of the cross-posted
newsgroups is off-topic for the post. Doing so just because you don't read
the other newsgroup(s) makes no sense at all.

When you're asking a question, it's especially dumb since the person to whom
you are directing the question may not be reading the same newsgroup you
are, but even if you're contributing new information, you are hurting the
entire community of the relevant newsgroups by artificially restricting the
free flow of on-topic information.

Pete