Chris Bannister wrote: > Bob Proulx wrote: > > Of course that applies to usenet newsgroups but does not apply to > > mailing lists such as debian-user. Mailing lists will generate a new > > message with the same message-id for every message regardless of > > whether it is crossposted to several mailing lists or not. > > Eeek! of course, humble apologies. But crossposting is still preferable > to multi posting as far as ML are concerned, would you agree?
Well... Neither are really preferable. :-) Posting the same message multiple times to multiple mailing lists is obviously bad. But crossposting also has problems. I mean do I as a subscriber on one of the mailing lists reply to all of them or just the one to which I am subscribed? If I do respond to all and the other mailing lists have different policies such as requiring being subscribed to post then I end up with a rejection. (Not a problem on Debian lists but true on others.) So normally I would only reply to the mailing list to which I am subscribed. But then that causes a split brain problem in the conversion. In any case it gets messy. I would prefer if people picked one venue and then had some patience for the discussion there before trying to start up the same thing on another list. Depending upon the result the discussion may move. Or it may conclude just fine on the first list. Or it may move but with a completely different direction due to the gain of the initial discussion. I don't think it is always bad. For example I would use it for announcements to an announcement only list in addition to a discussion list. But then also set both Mail-Followup-To and Reply-To back to a single discussion list. Because otherwise people group reply discussion back to the announcement only list. As an announcement list moderator elsewhere let me say that it does add to the moderator workload to need to be watchful for discussion replies from people who didn't know how to reply or used a poor mailer that didn't follow the rules in the reply. And for anyone that replies to them on the discussion list the CC's can continue for a long time. In the end it is a judgement call. Bob
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