gnus: Crosspost Handling
3.29 Crosspost Handling
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Marking cross-posted articles as read ensures that you’ll never have to
read the same article more than once. Unless, of course, somebody has
posted it to several groups separately. Posting the same article to
several groups (not cross-posting) is called “spamming”, and you are by
law required to send nasty-grams to anyone who perpetrates such a
heinous crime.
Remember: Cross-posting is kinda ok, but posting the same article
separately to several groups is not. Massive cross-posting (aka.
“velveeta”) is to be avoided at all costs, and you can even use the
‘gnus-summary-mail-crosspost-complaint’ command to complain about
excessive crossposting (
Summary Mail Commands).
One thing that may cause Gnus to not do the cross-posting thing
correctly is if you use an NNTP server that supports XOVER (which is
very nice, because it speeds things up considerably) which does not
include the ‘Xref’ header in its NOV lines. This is Evil, but all too
common, alas, alack. Gnus tries to Do The Right Thing even with XOVER
by registering the ‘Xref’ lines of all articles you actually read, but
if you kill the articles, or just mark them as read without reading
them, Gnus will not get a chance to snoop the ‘Xref’ lines out of these
articles, and will be unable to use the cross reference mechanism.
To check whether your NNTP server includes the ‘Xref’ header in its
overview files, try ‘telnet your.nntp.server nntp’, ‘MODE READER’ on
‘inn’ servers, and then say ‘LIST overview.fmt’. This may not work, but
if it does, and the last line you get does not read ‘Xref:full’, then
you should shout and whine at your news admin until she includes the
‘Xref’ header in the overview files.
If you want Gnus to get the ‘Xref’s right all the time, you have to
set ‘nntp-nov-is-evil’ to ‘t’, which slows things down considerably.
Also Slow/Expensive Connection.
C’est la vie.
For an alternative approach, Duplicate Suppression.
Info Catalog
gnus: Exiting the Summary Buffer
gnus: Summary Buffer
gnus: Duplicate Suppression