Crossposting

I love newsgroups. They are a great way to communicate with lots of people at the same time. It's one of the closest things to internet heaven when you stumble across a well moderated newsgroup with interested posters all discussing a subject which you enjoy.

It's important to remember that you must stay on topic at all times (there are occasional exceptions allowed, of course, but the subject should be clearly marked "off topic" or OT.) You should also take care to send the correct posting to the correct group. 

You see, in general people read newsgroups to get information and have conversations about specific topics. While an occasional note about something off topic is generally accepted, it is extremely annoying to the vast majority of newsgroup readers for this to become common.

It is quite common for people to be subscribed to many different newsgroups at the same time. This is a great way to get into conversations with groups which are on similar topics but with a different set of rules and posters. 

Sometimes you'll find that you want to post a message to more than one newsgroup at a time. For example, let's say you are a member of alt.clipart, alt.binaries.clip.art and alt.fantasy.clip.art and you have a message about something that all three might be interested in. The message is on-topic and probably of interest to members of all three groups.

You can do one of two things. You can multipost or crosspost. Multiposting is sending the same message to multiple groups as different messages, while crossposting is sending it as one message. More specifically, with crossposting you specify more than one newsgroup in the "to:" or "cc:" field, while in multiposting you specify one and only one. 

Let's step back one second. It's very important to understand that in general posting the same message to more than one newsgroup is frowned upon. Why? You see, newsgroups are not very efficient. The messages are actually transmitted all over the internet, and duplicated on tens of thousands of newsgroup servers. Thus one message posted to one newsgroup might result in an incredible amount of traffic. The same message posted to many newsgroups results in much more traffic, especially if that message contains binary or very large files.

Not only is this an issue, but if you multipost then anyone who is a member of the same newsgroups as you has to read the same message more than once. If, however, you crosspost, then the message will usually be filtered properly by most newsgroup clients. This means if someone reads the message from alt.binaries.clip.art he will not have to download it again from alt.clipart and alt.fantasy.clip.art.

So remember, stay on topic, try not to multipost and keep crossposting to a minimum. This way you will have the most productive and useful time spent with your newsgroups.