Community talk ⇒ Is crossposting inherently evil?

[JustA_LaTeXusr]

It was suggested to me to start this topic. I've been a supporter of judicious cross-posting, but unfortunately, it has gotten a bad rap due to abuse, mostly from the usenet days. It was used for spamming. However, cross-posting can be done without spamming, and vice-versa.

For real topics of discussion, real-life issues cannot be organized into a hierarchy, making it often hard to find the one (and only one) group that is appropriate for a topic. In other words, reality doesn't exist as a hierarchy, that's a cognitive structure that humans use to help organize many concepts. The closest thing that we have today (of which I'm aware) that fits the information that borne by "reality" is ontology.

Being constrained to post in a group corresponding to one leaf node of a hierarchical tree means that there can be other audiences for whom a topic is relevant but who cannot see the post. This may disadvantage the audiences and the poster. This is especially true if the multiple relevant groups exists in different hierarchies, such as this community and stack exchange.

So how can cross-posting be done without the consequences of the past, and without wasting the time of respondents to a cross-post? Well, the time if the respondent is wasted if he/she isn't aware that a question has been addressed in another community, so that seems to be a problem of visibility. That can be solved by making the cross-posting nature of a posting explicit e.g. by providing links to the other fora. As for the spamming, that would have to be dealt with by policing.

This seems to be the spirit of the posting policy articulated at http://latex-community.org/home/latex-c ... crossposts.

Comments are welcome, but I implore you to keep it undogmatic and consider other viewpoints, especially if they resolve issues that you raise about crossposting (or against cross-posting).

[cgnieder]

Our board rules state:

A crossposting is always contra-productive. But there is nothing really against it as long as it is mentioned. This means that a direct link has to be added. So other users who want to help are preserved from double efforts and waste of time.

This means we don't have anything against crossposting as long as potential helpers know about the crossposting and can have a look at the other posts and answers provided there.

I do like this policy. Although many LaTeX users are active on several forums like this one or the Q&A site TeX.sx some prefer the one site to the other and this means everybody gains if a question contains a link to potential answers are provided. Helpers can see if answers were already given and won't waste their time trying to answer a question that already has been answered.

I especially think that it is not a waste of time if crosspostings occur between sites in different languages. For example many German users (like me) are active in German and English forums. For people like me it does not make a difference if a post has been made to en English forum or to a German forum. But think of users not speaking German finding a post here describing their problem and all they find is a link to a forum in a language they don't speak. Those users would gain much if the corresponding answer was also given here in English.

I do know that not everybody shares my opinion. In many of the German forums for example they really don't like crosspostings and sometimes even forbid them even if the crossposting is made in different languages.

I do agree, though, that it is not polite to make crosspostings without telling it.

Regards

[JustA_LaTeXusr]

Thanks for sharing, cgnieder.

I'd really be curious as to what some of the drawbacks of crossposting are (which are not resolvable with the current crossposting rules). I encounter some very adamant views on this, but it seems to me that the reasons for them are effectively addressed by the rules. I might be missing something, and it may just be a matter of properly articulating what the problem is.