breastle screen for HLA Adventure Need help designing one

Mike Snyder

The short answer is: use the "Followup-to" header. That's what it's there for.

Longer answer follows:

Threads will eventually, sooner or later, drift away from the original topic. Crossposted threads are likely to do so sooner. Once this happens in a crossposted thread, it will (by the very definition of crossposting) annoy more people than when the same thing happens in an ordinary thread that is only posted to a single newsgroup. So what to do?

If you start a new thread by crossposting your initial article to several relevant groups 1 (which is usually done because you want to get the largest possible audience for your question or announcement) it would usually be a good idea to limit the followups to only one of them, right from the beginning of the thread. Why? When people actually start discussing in a crossposted thread, it's already too late. Controlling where the followups will go from that point on will be very hard.

But how can you redirect followups to someplace else than what it says in the "Newsgroups" header? That's actually quite simple; just write the name of the desired target group in the "Followup-to" header field. When people now post a followup to your initial message, their newsreader will automatically copy the contents of your original "Followup-to" header into their "Newsgroup" header. Ta-dah! Instant redirection. 2

When using this kind of technique, it would be useful to view your crossposted initial message not as an ordinary discussion starter, but rather as an invitation to discuss the subject in the preselected target group. Just remember to make your intentions clear in a human-readable way - not only in headers of the initial article, but in the message body as well. Even though the Followup-to field is visible in the headers, in practice people seldom actively pay much attention to the header fields. The fact that the followups will end up someplace else than what would be obvious may be lost on many - it may go unnoticed even for those who actually write a followup to your initial article themselves. It's a good practice to always explicitly state that the followups have been set to go to only one of the initial groups. (And if you want to be extra polite, it would be nice if you could include a couple of words of reasoning for that choice as well.)

Then how should you choose the newsgroup where the discussion will end up? It should obviously be one of the groups that's already on the Newsgroup line, since there isn't much sense in posting to one set of groups and redirecting the followups to some other group where the original post was not even visible. But which one should it be? Pick the group that is the most relevant to your question AND the foreseeable discussion it is likely to spawn. If you can't decide which group that would be, toss a coin.

You can limit the groups also in mid-discussion (I just did that in another message posted to this thread), but specifically because of the concerns you raise above, this kind of limitation is (ideally) best done by not editing the "Newsgroups" list but, instead, by including a "Followup-to" header with a limited list of groups, and mentioning about it in your message. This way everyone following the discussion in the original set of groups will still know where the rest of the discussion went.

If people direct the flow of discussion by setting the "Followup-to" header (instead of just brutally slashing off groups from the "Newsgroup" line), and if they also politely mention about setting the followups to go to someplace else, it will be easy for you to follow the discussion wherever it was redirected to. You don't have to figure anything out yourself.

That's correct. Especially if you're asking about something and multipost your question to several groups, the threads will be separate and they don't have any connection to each othe, whatsoever. People in all those different groups won't see and can't check if someone else has already answered your question in some other group, as they do not know that the same question was posted to the other groups in the first place. You will probably get more answers by multiposting, but you will also make people work collectively harder for you, which is not very nice. Multiposting is somewhat impolite as many of those answers will be largely redundant: people have taken their time to help you out but they would not necessarily want to hear that they've written a long message about something that has already been exhaustively answered in another group.

Last but not least, multiposting is also hard for the multiposter himself, since he has to keep polling for the answers in all of those groups, instead of simply following one of them. (There is also a problem with false information and corrections: if someone answers your question incorrectly in one group, more knowledgeable people in the other groups following the other threads you started by multiposting the same article will not see that, and can't correct it.)

1 Well, at least one could hope people would really take their time choosing only relevant groups when crossposting.

2 If it only was that simple, but I'm actually lying here. Yes, normal newsreader software will usually respect the "Followup-to" header, working just the way as described above, but Google Groups doesn't. (Or at least the old Google Groups interface didn't - I'm not sure about the Google Groups Beta.) What is more, some people (you know the type - trolls and the like) do not want to respect the wishes of the original poster but edit the suggested headers manually and post their followups to wherever they wish, regardless of whether their posts have anything to do with the newsgroups where they're posted to. In other words, the "Followup-to" header is only a suggestion; not something you could force upon other people. But it still works most of the time, especially if you politely explain the "whys" and "wheres" in a couple of words each time you use it.

-- znark