As a moderator of a half a dozen forums I can tell you that this type of behavior is causing both an administrative burden for moderators to clean up orphaned messages and it is damaging the value of every forum where this happens. People are being banned from forums as a result of this behavior. The person which this impacts the most is the one who takes the time to research issues before posting. It becomes impossible to figure out which of the identical threads are authoritative for responses and which one(s) have an actual, correct, usable answer. You can often find cases where threads in multiple locations have a germ of a response, but the full answer takes assembling the inklings from multiple locations into one solution. The full solution has never been provided by the originator of a shotgun post back to all of the forums where the post was originally posted. On the one hand the poster demands a solution as quickly as possible and then does not return the favor by posting the solution to every location where the demand has been made. Engage in this behavior on Yahoo, GoogleGroups, LinkedIn and a few other locations and you will very likely never be able to post to those locations again. This is how damaging to the value of the forums this behavior is considered to be. For more mature engineers, the ones which actually have the answers you seek, behaviorally this shotgun cross posting communicates some items which the poster may not want to communicate regarding a lack of existing research into an issue, the respect with which the poster treats engineering peers and the level of desperation to find an answer as quickly as possible. The problem is that such posting behavior works against encouraging a response from such individuals. Make no mistake, SHOTGUN CROSS FORUM POSTING OF THE SAME QUESTION IS NO DIFFERENT THAN SOMEONE TYPING IN ALL CAPS AS IF THEY WERE SCREAMING AT EVERYONE READING THE MESSAGE. Food for thought from a moderator across multiple forums and someone with 20 years under his belt in this discipline.