On Wed, 21 Jan 2004 22:31:04 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote:

Some pilots hang out in ".piloting." Others prefer ".owning." Folks
building airplanes tend to hang out in ".homebuilt." If you want to make
an announcement to ALL of them -- or if you wish to query ALL of them, why
wouldn't you cross-post your message?

The dislike of cross-posting may be mostly a holdover from the old days...
the early news-reading programs even gave you a warning if you listed more
than one newsgroup as a destination. The early programs didn't "weed out"
the messages from subsequent newsgroups...heck, I still see them all when I
use Forte Agent. I've probably got a setting wrong, but it doesn't bother
me to the extent that I'll spend time chasing it down.

Crossposting probably got its bad rep back in the days when there weren't a
wide expanse of sub-groups... it was obviously bad form to post the same
message to net.aviation and net.autos. Yet even then, there were those who
were able to rationalize it.

Back when the sub-groups popped up, the general philosophy seemed be that
every group hierarchy would include a "*.misc" newsgroup that would be used
for items of general interest. Nominally, then, a general question should
be posted only to rec.aviation.misc. But there's nothing that forces
people to subscribe to that group, hence a "to everyone" posting done in
r.a.misc doesn't get the widest readership.

Being one who grew up feeding the line eater, I crosspost extremely rarely.
When I reply, I almost always reply only in the newsgroup in which I first
saw the message. So if you *do* crosspost to multiple groups, do readers
the courtesy of at least posting only to groups that you subscribe to.
Otherwise, you might be missing answers to your question.

Ron Wanttaja