>Is there a problem then with cross posting news groups - no more so >that asking Librarians to report on which "foreigners" read what books. The Usenet attitude is best explained by the general reaction to JJ's mail. JJ's two sins, according to most flamers, were: 1) Posting outside the topic of the newsgroup. Panhandling in "comp.sys.ibmpc" isn't germane to the topic of the group. A group actually exists for things that fall outside all other groups: "misc.misc". 2) Posting the same message to many newsgroups, instead of posting a single message to multiple groups. To the un-initiated, these two choices sound alike, but they aren't. All messages are required to have a unique message-id attached to them (in the "Message-id:" header), and most newsreading programs will only present a message to you once, regardless of how many groups it was posted to. JJ posted a separate message, with a different message-id, to each group. The result was that you actually saw the message umpteen-zillion times. That is, unless JJ made it into your "kill file" after the first few ;-) . Ross Patterson Rutgers University ------------------ End of included file DATABASE OUTPUT -----------------