That'd help some, but it wouldn't really solve the problem. (For example,
my FAQ has six unmoderated groups plus the three *.answers groups it's
required to appear in.) The real problem is that with the fragmentation
of Usenet discussion, FAQs are frequently applicable to a bunch of
newsgroups. Whether there *should* be umpteen thousand Big Eight
newsgroups is a useless discussion --- there *are*, and the count rises
every month as people decide that splitting a newsgroup is a good way to
handle too much traffic. A FAQ has to hit some reasonable fraction of the
applicable newsgroups, or people aren't going to find it before they give
up and post a question instead.
>> Big 8 moderated newsgroups, perhaps, or a specific exemption for
>> news.answers. Or a higher cutoff for posts with followups set to a single
>> group.
>
> The latter idea would be a good one, yes; such messages aren't
> causing as much problems.
No, it wouldn't help at all for the stated objective: the spammers would
just start including Followup-To: lines in their spam. The real issue
here is whether crossposting is a good criterion for identifying spam
in the first place.
An exemption for Followup-To would help to curb those widely crossposted
flamefests that we've all seen way too much of. But that's not the stated
reason for modifying the news software, and I haven't seen anyone claiming
that overly crossposted threads are about to kill the net. We've been
living with them for a long time.
One thing that just occurred to me --- news administration policies are
not the only anti-crosspost hazards out there. I have more than once seen
people recommend using newsreader filters to suppress overly crossposted
articles. The worst examples of this have been rn filter recipes (that
zap more than so-many commas in Newsgroups:) posted as "a way to kill
spam" without any explanation of why or what the recipe actually does.
An unsuspecting newbie could take the recipe, drop it into his newsreader
config without any clue as to just what it does, and happily buzz along ...
ignorant that he's now missing some fraction of FAQ posts ...
regards, tom lane
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