On Thu, 12 Nov 1998 08:22:26 GMT, povray.org admin team 
	<new### [at] DESPAMpovrayorg> wrote:
>>PLEASE don't cross post on the povray new server. It isn't necessay.
>
>As a rule, I'd like to request regular users of this server to simply not reply
>to such posts. Helping them only encourages them to do the same thing again.

[Note: newsgroups line trimmed to .general]

I didn't see the original post, but if crossposting to two groups is the
only problem, it doesn't seem like something to get upset over.  I
permanently solved my problem with crossposting by ditching Agent and
getting a newsreader that really understands crossposting and only shows
crossposted messages once.  (Yes, I know Agent SAYS it does that... has 
anyone ever seen it actually work?)

Yes, crossposting to inappropriate or too many groups is bad, but
it doesn't seem too unlikely, especially for someone who might not
be entirely familiar with netiquette, to post something to both 
.newusers and .general.  There's a lot of overlap in subject matter 
between those two groups, so it can be hard to tell which one is
appropriate, even if you read the previous posts.  New users are 
unlikely to know what percentage of people subscribe to both; in 
fact, I suspect it's sustantially smaller than even experienced
users might think.

I have to say that I don't think it's very useful to just ignore 
these people; they'll never know why they didn't get an answer if 
someone doesn't tell them, and if they don't get an answer they might
just give up on POV-Ray in frustration.  Maybe a polite email response 
giving them an answer and advising them on the finer points of netiquette 
wouldn't be out of line.  Lots of polite email responses (from different
people, of course) will help illustrate the point that crossposting can 
be annoying. :-)

The posts we should be upset about are the people asking about
programming issues in .windows, or the people asking about scripting
issues in .programming.  Perhaps a periodic post reminding people 
what the purpose of each newsgroup is wouldn't hurt in that regard.
Ideally, it would have a subject line that includes the last revision 
date so we can score it low (or killfile it) once we've read it once, 
and only see it again when it changes.  Yes, I know that information 
is listed at www.povray.org, but I'm sure a lot of people here got 
the news server address from someone on cgrr and have never even seen 
the page on www.povray.org. 

If this is generally adjudged to be a good idea, I'd be happy to 
help out in any way I can, including writing and maintaining a FAQ 
for any of the groups I subscribe to (especially povray.programming!)
Yes, I know I once said a periodic FAQ is useless on a server where
posts are kept forever, but I failed to realize how very few people
actually bother to look at older posts.

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