For the purposes of searching an archive and for those who wish to download the entire set of surnames posts, this will be the group of choice. The places are taken from a list used by s.g.surnames and by other online databases. With one automoderation address, the posting will be done all at once with consistency, and posters will know that their messages will go to all the right groups, and will show up only once in each group and it will assure that the message does not go any non-relevant groups. Cross-posting to other relevant groups outside the soc.genealogy. Posting of surname queries in magazines and newsletters has been a popular method of genealogical inquiry for decades, and on-line queries are posted to most genealogy newsgroups, although soc.genealogy.surnames is the group which was designed for such messages.
Many queries are for people who are known to have migrated from one country to another.
Those messages are useful for readers from any area through which the person migrated, and can be effectively posted to more than one regional surnames newsgroup. Searching through the many queries, both on-line and in the archives, is much easier when subject lines are formatted uniformly. In order to assure that this format, or any other format which may be later introduced by the moderators, is used for each post, the groups will be moderated. The automoderation software, already successfully implemented for soc.genealogy.surnames, will moderate all the surnames groups. Posters will be informed of any changes made by the automoderator to the Newsgroups line of their post.