If you post same question on multiple forums, are you cross-posting?

Today I found someone posting exactly the same questions on arduino forum and at leas another online forum. I wonder how people feel about this compared to cross-posting on the same online forum. Apparently there are similarities and differences so what do you think?

I think it's OK to post the same question to different communities. Obviously, posting the same question in multiple sections of the same forum is frowned up (though I wonder why the forum software can't be smart enough to do what NNTP newsreaders have been doing for decades: merge the discussion and track it across multiple sections).

Why would it be bad to ask different communities?

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The Ruggeduino: compatible with Arduino UNO, 24V operation, all I/O's fused and protected

Just want to know people's general opinion. Let's say if the OP can't keep updating both threads on both forums then those helpers on the forum that gets less updates from the OP are hanging there wondering if their helps worked or not.

I generally don't like same postings on different sections on the Arduino forum. I costs me (everyone) extra time to follow progress in both (or more) threads, so if I see crossposting I often ask the OP to remove one thread, if the OP is new I explain a bit more and sometimes I advise which thread is in the most relevant section. If the OP still keeps the 2 threads I ignore that discussion to prevent loss of my time.

If someone asks the same question on different fora, e.g AVR and Arduino, that's ok with me. I appreciate if they tell it in their post so I can check the other forum. And I appreciate it even more if results from the other forum are shared here (and vice versa).

my 2 cents,
Rob

RuggedCircuits:
I wonder why the forum software can't be smart enough to do what NNTP newsreaders have been doing for decades: merge the discussion and track it across multiple sections).

Whew. It's been a while since I messed around on Usenet. Was fun for a while, for sure. IIRC, a newsreader will generate a unique message ID when it posts. Not sure how that happens, but it's also the identical message that gets sent to multiple newsgroups, so things such as message digest can also be used to find duplicates. A cross-post on a forum might differ in some trivial way, such as inclusion of a comma, or an extra space someplace, unless the poster is really always using the computer's paste buffer to post multiple messages. It might be possible to do some filtering of ancillary characters, such as whitespace and punctuation, and hash the result, to find duplicates. My experience is that most forums rely on users doing moderator notifications, and then the moderators merge the threads.

Obviously, across multiple forums, this is problematic, though with all the right bits in place, I can squint and envision the possibility of some sort of XML-RPC sort of thing which could be used among cooperating forums. Not sure what the incentive is, except to find more answers than were offered in places you're frequenting.

What Rob said.

But why don't you ask the question on a few other forums and see what they say?


Rob

Graynomad:
But why don't you ask the question on a few other forums and see what they say?

XD

Wish I'd thought of that.

This discussion has made me think about the fact that occasionally an OP disappears in the middle of a discussion or before letting the forum know whether proposed solutions worked. Maybe they got help elsewhere, solved the problem but didn't get back. This is impossible to track down but I think this type of behavior should not be encouraged. I should probably ask on other forums about the same question but maybe I'll be considered cross-posting myself :wink: