Subject: Instructions about cross-posting

14. *****
 Q: What is cross-posting? How do I do it?

 A: As we all know, Usenet news have the newsgroups divided by the
topic areas. If you want your message to appear in more than one
newsgroup you can achieve this by cross-posting. If you look at the
header in the news you will notice the item Newsgroups:. Put the
names of the newsgroups in there separated by commas. Scan the
headers of almost any newsgroup, and you are bound to see how it is
done.
   The number one rule of cross-posting is that cross-posting should
never be used indiscriminately. If you feel that it is necessary to
cross-post, consider carefully your selection, and keep it down.
Avoid cross-posting to groups that are branches of the same
sub-hierarchy, that is don't cross-post to adjacent newsgroups.
   What goes for newsgroup selection in general, also applies to
cross-posting. Never cross-post to newsgroups which do not coincide
with your subject.
   There is one very important DON'T in cross-posting. Do not send
the same message separately to different newsgroups. Always use the
cross-posting facility of the news (Newsgroups:). If you repeat a
message separately in different newsgroups, the readers will have to
see your posting many times over, and will get annoyed. You have a
good chance of justifiably ending up flamed.
   I have heard that there are some newsreader programs that do not
allow editing the headers. I can only suggest contacting your system
manager or some other local guru about it. I have no further
information on this unusual dilemma since on most news programs
editing the headers is not a problem. Be careful, however, if you
edit the headers. Learn their exact requirements. If you make
mistakes, the posting may fail, and/or the followups to it by other
users may fail because of your editing errors. For example
 Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal.borland,comp.os.msdos.programmer,
would result in an error in following up because of the trailing
comma.

 A2: Here are a couple of further tips when you have got the hang of
cross posting. As you can see there is a "Followup-To:" field in the
news header. Sometimes you might want to direct the replies only a
to single newsgroup even if you have cross posted the original. The
rationale here is to prevent the discussion from scattering to
several newsgroups. Please consider using this option whenever you
cross post.
   Some users put the word poster in there to redirect the potential
replies directly to them by email. The problem with this method is
that even if it should work, it is not guaranteed to do so. Some
system configurations and newsreaders do not handle this correctly.
For example I usually get a bounce if I reply to such a posting.
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